The life of Louie Zamperini was certainly an eventful one. Following a youth of petty crime, he eventually discovered distance running, went on to break college records and competed in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. When WWII broke out, Zamperini enlisted in the Air Force, and in 1943 his bomber crash-landed in the Pacific. He and two other surviving crew members drifted across the ocean in a life-raft, holding out for a staggering 47 days before eventually being found – by the Japanese Navy. He spent the next two years imprisoned in a series of interrogation and POW camps, ultimately surviving to see the end of the war and his eventual release.
So there’s hardly a shortage of material for Angelina Jolie’s third and most ambitious directorial effort, and to be fair, it does get a lot of things right. It opens on a scene of Zamperini (Jack O’Connell) and his crew carrying out a bombing raid on Japanese fortifications and repelling enemy fighters. It’s a thrilling, edge-of-your-seat intro and a late contender for best action scene of 2014.
‘So there’s hardly a shortage of material for Angelina Jolie’s third and most ambitious directorial effort, and to be fair, it does get a lot of things right.’
The second act, in which Zamperini and his fellow survivors (Finn Wittrock and an excellent Domhnall Gleeson) face the elements from the minute protection of their life raft is similarly riveting,with the three men enduring storms, shark attacks, a genuinely frightening attack by an enemy plane, and the ever looming threats of starvation and insanity.
The cracks begin to show, however, once the action moves to the prison camps. This section takes up half of the movie’s two-hour running time, and frankly, the endless barrage of cruelty quickly makes the transition from queasy to monotonous. Zamperini in particular is singled out for torment and humiliation by a sadistic prison commander nicknamed “The Bird”, complete with homoerotic overtones so thick you could cut it with a knife. By all accounts, this is relatively faithful to the actual events of Zamperini’s ordeal, but they add little that’s new to a Prisoner of War subgenre that has been done to death since the sixties.
‘The cracks begin to show, however, once the action moves to the prison camps.’
Which brings me to the big issue with Unbroken, the one which keeps it from achieving it’s potential for greatness, and that is in the way this material has translated to film. Apparently taking her cue from the majesty and spectacle of David Lean, Jolie directs the film in broad, sweeping strokes, but The Bridge on the River Kwai it isn’t. The trouble is that the tale of Louie Zamperini is so epic, so extraordinary, that it is hard to believe this could actually have happened. Unbroken doesn’t do much to lend it credibility, making a myth out of its hero, rather than humanising him.