Unbroken dramatizes a portion of the rather astonishing life of Louis Zamperini. Zamperini (played in the movie by Jack O’Connell) ran in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, and would go on to join the air force. What should have been a routine rescue mission goes wrong, and his plane crashes in the middle of the ocean. He, along with a couple of other airmen, would end up spending 47 days at sea, only to be picked by the Japanese navy. Zamperini would then spend the rest of the World War II as a prisoner, much of it under the cruel, watchful eye of Watanabe (Japanese pop star Miyavi).
Zamperini is a terrific subject, but there is very little of the man in this movie. Unbroken ends up forgetting about its main character in the pursuit of depicting the terrors he went through. At some point, it just becomes one scene of torture after another, the movie making much out of the character enduring this pain, without really examining what it is about the character that allowed him to survive. Unbroken turns a fascinating tale of survival into a generic struggle, the movie devoid of any distinct style or flair.
The film really seems to be fascinated mostly by the tortures that Zamperini encountered. It lingers on the physical details, on the visible deterioration of his form. It doesn’t seem to care much about his mindset. There is a part in the movie, for example, where Watanabe orders the prisoners to all take a swing at Zamperini. What follows is an interminable sequence of punches, with little variation in the way they’re shot or edited. What the film fails to show is what happens afterwards; how those punches affected his standing in the camp, or how the torture may have affected him. There was no conversation about what those punches meant. For what is played as such an important dramatic moment, the movie seem weirdly ready to just throw it away right after it happens.
To its credit, the film looks really good. But that is just what happens when you hire Roger Deakins to shoot your movie. There are plenty of striking, beautifully lit images within the film’s 137-minute runtime. But there doesn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason behind those beautiful shots. Director Angelina Jolie doesn’t tell much of a story through these gorgeous frames. At best, she mimics the appearance of the kind of film that gets awards attention.
In general, that seems to be the approach that the film takes. The music is appropriately soaring. The editing plays it safe. The acting is all very capable, though somewhat unremarkable. Jack O’Connell is all right as Zamperini, though again the movie provides little insight into the character’s inner life. There is little for the actor to do other than look determined. The one somewhat daring choice the film makes is in the casting of Japanese pop star Miyavi as Watanabe. Miyavi, a product of the visual kei side of the Japanese pop industry, is the kind of pretty that reads as fey. The film seems to posit that Watanabe was a closet case, which is actually pretty trite.
Unbroken ends with a bunch of text with some details about Zamperini’s life after the war. And it feels as though the film is missing out on some quality drama. But again, the film doesn’t seem to be overly interested in the man himself. It is really is all about the torture, the physical trials that he went through. And while it makes for engaging cinema at first, it gets really tiresome after a while. And then the film just keeps on going, showing more pain, but never attaining any insight.
My Rating:
