World War II Netflix Drama Shows BrutalIty Of POW Camps
For decades, Joel and Ethan Coen have given film audiences epics and period pieces that have reimagined romantic eras with unforgettable characters. The filmmaker duo’s only foray into the turbulent times of global war was their 2014 saga Unbroken, an intense drama that followed various prisoners of war during World War II. The film gave moviegoers a realistic look at the atrocities committed by the Japanese Imperial forces against Allied POWs after capturing them in 1943.
Unbroken
Unbroken follows former Olympic runner Louis Zamperini as he and other survivors of a plane crash are adrift on a life raft after their search and rescue plane crashes into the Pacific Ocean during the height of Pacific Theater combat in World War II. After nearly 50 days drifting in the shark-infested waters, Japanese naval forces discover Louis and the others and force them into POW camps.
During his two years as a captive, Louis was beaten and tortured under the direction of a harsh camp commander named Mutsuhiro Watanabe. Unbroken sees the prisoner survive with his sense of resolve until the camp is liberated at the end of the war.
Adapted From A Book
Unbroken was scripted by Joel and Ethan Coen, along with fellow screenwriters Richard LaGravenese and William Nicholson. But the movie was taken from original source material, a 2010 non-fiction book titled Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, by Laura Hillenbrand. Like the film, the book follows the real-life events of Captain Louis Zamperini and his two-year ordeal as a prisoner of war.
Directed By Angelina Jolie
While the Coens transformed Hillenbrand’s book into a workable screenplay, the film Unbroken was directed by actress and filmmaker Angelina Jolie, who also served as the project’s producer. The combination of the Tomb Raider actress’s directorial abilities and Joel and Ethan Coen’s wordsmithing led to a film that was a box-office success.
Unbroken raked in more than $163 million in gross box office receipts against a budget of $65 million and has performed well with its physical media sales.
Banned In Japan
Critically Unbroken was met with mixed reviews, however. Its contemporary critics praised the acting and the cinematic score, but many were especially unimpressed with the film’s pace. But the harshest critics of all were activists in Japan who demanded that the movie be banned from theaters in their country.
Hillenbrand’s Unbroken book chronicled the horrors that the POWs were forced to endure by their Japanese captors, many of which were left out of the movie. Specifically, the author’s referencing of how the Japanese Imperial Army would perform medical experiments on the captured soldiers, engage in cannibalism, and various methods of torturing them to death served to add to the controversy. As a result, the film wasn’t released in Japan until 2016 and then only to a very limited number of theater screens.
Streaming On Netflix
REVIEW SCORE
Stateside, Unbroken might have received a mixed batch of critical reviews, but that didn’t stop the Academy from recognizing the film’s finest attributes. While not emerging with any little gold statues, Unbroken was nominated for three Academy Awards that include Best Cinematography, Best Sound Editing, and Best Sound Mixing. The American Film Institute awarded it with a place on its Top Ten Films of the Year for 2014.
You can catch the Coen brothers war epic Unbroken streaming on Netflix.
