Unbroken (2014)
Directed by Angelina Jolie
A chronicle of the life of Louis Zamperini, an Olympic runner who was taken prisoner by Japanese forces during World War II.
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4 films that influenced Unbroken
What critics say influenced Unbroken
Soon, Louis’s track coach and his brother discover Louis’s speed in a scene that’s almost a shot-for-shot remake of Forrest Gump running across the football field in Forrest Gump (Angelina Jolie is supposedly good friends with Forrest Gump writer Eric Roth, so maybe it was an intentional homage).
Each of Unbroken’s many segments echoes past prestige pictures, sometimes unfortunately (it’s hard to watch Zamperini’s running-career montage without thinking of Forrest Gump) and sometimes awkwardly.
Occasionally easy on the eyes, “Unbroken” isn’t exactly a chore to sit through, but it’s the kind of processed, rah-rah filmmaking mostly left to cable showings of 90s dramas like “Rudy” and “Forrest Gump.”
There are points at which Unbroken reminds us of Mel Gibson’s unbridled display of the mortification of the flesh in The Passion of the Christ.
Mortification simply comes to dominate all and the climactic battle of wills between Zamperini and Watanabe, at a hellish end-of-the-war-and-world coal-loading facility, all but literally evokes “The Passion of the Christ.”
It's essentially a 1940s propaganda flick, an act of torture porn not entirely unlike Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, and it should, consequently, appeal to exactly the same audience.
“Unbroken” may be the most interminable display of male suffering in a wide-release film since the lavish homoerotic pummeling of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ.”
We’ve already mentioned Riefenstahl (director of “Olympia” and “Triumph of the Will”), but much more prominent are a kind of Spielbergian nostalgic glow/childlike thrill-of-action vibe in the earlier sections.
(The raft segment recalls Life Of Pi without the preternatural beauty or the tiger.)
It may not be fair, but Unbroken suffers from comparisons to the impressionistic storytelling of Ang Lee’s metaphorical stranded-at-sea tale Life of Pi and the in-the-moment immediacy of J.C. Chandor’s All is Lost, starring Robert Redford.
The second is a liferaft picture — less the fantastical “Life of Pi” than Alfred Hitchcock’s grittier-minded “Lifeboat.”
While she’s a relative newbie in terms of direction (she’s only made one feature film previously), she’s backed by a ridiculously talented crew that includes cinematographer Roger Deakins (The Shawshank Redemption), composer Alexandre Desplat (The King’s Speech), and editors William Goldberg (Argo) and Tim Squyers (Life Of Pi).
Jolie’s not incapable of making good cinema: the entirety of the raft sequence is generally great, a more severe, realistic version of Life of Pi with noticeably crummier CGI, or a three-handed successor to All Is Lost .
We get the Olympics, the raft ordeal and the prison camp — in movie terms, Chariots of Fire plus Life of Pi plus The Bridge on the River Kwai.