Unbroken

This World War II film dazzles with cinematography but betrays a distorted sense of history

Angelina Jolie may have intended to make a film on Christian forgiveness, but in Unbroken, she ends up doing quite the opposite. The movie is about Louis Zamperini, an Olympic athlete and a World War II bombardier on board a US bomber who survives 47 days adrift at sea on a safety raft after a crash and is then taken prisoner of war by Japanese forces.

Jolie shows graphic scenes of Zamperini (Jack O’Connell) being tortured and, in the end, tells us that he forgave his Japanese captors—including a sadomasochistic commander (Miyavi) who clearly had homo-erotic feelings towards him and got turned on every time he beat him nearly to death.

To emphasise the notion of forgiveness, Unbroken has a scene that evokes the crucifixion. Zamperini is forced to lift a huge block of wood over his shoulder and stay put in that position for a long time, making a transparent visual reference to Christ on the Cross. This is Hollywood hogwash.

Apart from betraying what’s clearly a distorted sense of history, the use of this metaphor is inappropriate. Zamperini’s task in the war, which he did enthusiastically till his plane fell in the ocean, was to bomb targets, and the US Air Force did a pretty good job of it, flattening most Japanese cities before nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So who is supposed to forgive whom? A much more sensitive and intelligent film, on exactly the same subject and theme, is by Japanese filmmaker Nagisa Oshima. In his Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence (1983), he shows how war heroes and war criminals are only defined by who wins the war, and that forgiveness is not the prerogative of the victor.

Still, the first hour of Unbroken is very well done, particularly the dog fights and the scenes of airmen adrift on the vast ocean. Credit for this must go to cinematographer Roger Deakins, who provides an excellent widescreen palette for the movie.

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Ajit Duara