I don’t know what director Angelina Jolie thinks her movie Unbroken is, but the last thing it seems to be is the story of Louis Zamperini, the Olympian and war hero whose life story was told in Laura Hillenbrand’s New York Times-bestselling book “Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption“. Major milestones in Zamperini’s early life are turned into cheap catchphrases such as “If you can take it, you can make it” while his 47 days at sea after his plane went down and his time in Japanese POW camps are either cheaply rendered as if they were shot in a Beverly Hills pool, or so focused on Zamperini’s suffering that nothing more than Jolie’s determination to show said suffering comes across, rather than tell the story of the man (and his fellow captors) that survived the trials they faced.
How Hillenbrand’s book was turned into this travesty is unfathomable. While reading the story of Zamperini you can tell early on it’s going to be a tough nut to crack. His time before becoming an Olympic runner and his efforts to even race in Hitler’s Olympics, up to and including shaking the Führer’s hand (not seen in the movie by the way), is enough for a movie in and of itself. Once he enters the war it’s more than a second chapter in his life, it’s enough to be another life altogether, a life wherein a three act structure doesn’t fit and it clearly had Jolie and the film’s team of screenwriters at a loss.
To that point it’s amazing to see Joel and Ethan Coen credited as screenwriters alongside Oscar-nominated writers William Nicholson (Gladiator) and Richard LaGravenese (The Fisher King). These guys wrote this? I was asking myself.
Presented as a series of episodes, many of which out of order, we bounce through the life of Zamperini as if it’s a story being told at a cocktail party. Nuance is lost as we only get to know the characters as participants in the events they’re involved in and the trials they face, but not who they are as people. Zamperini is just the face Jolie decides to focus on in a sea of several others, none of which can necessarily be considered characters as much as they are simply faces.
Jack O’Connell, whose career is sky-rocketing right now thanks to performances in films such as Starred Up and the forthcoming ’71, is given nothing to do as Zamperini other than look pained and tortured. Who was Louis Zamperini? Based on this movie you wouldn’t be able to answer that question as the even greater study seems to be on the film’s antagonist, Mutsuhiro Watanabe, as portrayed by Japanese musician Miyavi.
Watanabe, or “The Bird” as he was nicknamed by POW inmates, was a corporal in the Japanese army and served as prison guard at the POW camps where Zamperini found himself. Watanabe’s brutal behavior of the inmates becomes the primary focus of the latter half of Unbroken, his treatment of the POWs and Zamperini in-particular becoming Jolie’s attention, Jolie seeming to believe if she is relentless in its presentation the story will be told. On the contrary all she ends up with is a movie about suffering and wrong-doing, we all agree the way the POWs were treated was deplorable and it’s even worse when you learn Watanabe got away with his crimes, but I didn’t need a two-plus hour movie to come to that conclusion.
The story, as told, will likely be seen as fascinating at points to anyone unfamiliar with Zamperini’s life, but as interesting and moving as some aspects may be, Jolie shows little to no attempt to allow us to get to know her protagonist. Zamperini is seen dropping bombs over a target therefore we know he’s a bombardier. He’s seen running so we know he runs. He’s seen at the Olympics so we know he’s an Olympian. He’s seen in a POW camp so we know he’s a prisoner of war. But these are all just labels, these don’t define Zamperini as a character. It’s the struggle to get to these points in his life that are lost and his reason for being where he is. It’s the in-between moments that are missing. Jolie has created a 137-minute highlight reel that ends up proving monotonous and redundant, leaving us with nothing more than Zamperini’s resume in the end.
Shockingly, cinematographer Roger Deakins can’t even do much with the material, granting us a few pretty shots and, working in conjunction with the production design team, has done a great job differentiating the POW camps from one another, but the scenes at sea, as I said, are terrible. The performances, pretty much across the board, are flat and wooden with no help from the screenwriting or direction.
In the end, Unbroken is a massively missed opportunity. It would seem Jolie assumed the story was moving enough to tell itself, all she had to do was put the pictures on the screen. Unfortunately, a great life has not been given a great life on screen as this is even well below typical biopic standards and a chore to get through.
