Daniel Craig is cool. He was a perfect pick for Bond, he made Casino Royale awesome and Quantum of Solace watchable. But the question remains: can he play a Russian Jew in the midst of the Holocaust, living out in the forest?
The answer is simply, yes. With the help of Sabretooth (Liev Schreiber), anything's possible though. The movie is more of a character drama than a war movie, surrounding the story of the lives of the Jews who have escaped to the forest and fell in with Craig and his Bielski family, who were basically bad-ass Jewish Russians.
The movie really made me want to read the book that it was based upon (which in turn is based upon a true story), in order to find out how much of it was true. I can say first off, that them speaking English in bad Russian accents was likely not true, but the rest of the story seemed just implausible enough to be based on a real story.
Aside from the reality of the story, it played out interestingly enough to keep my attention, although at times, I admit I struggled. The problem was that Matt and I had recently been talking about My Side of the Mountain, and I couldn't help but keep thinking that this movie was just that book with some Nazis in the background.
All joking aside, the movie was very well written, with plenty of food for thought on the ethics of survival and community. I only wish that it had been developed as a miniseries or something, in order to give more time to flesh out the camp aside from the few that we were introduced to. But then again, it was more a story about the Bielski family than the camp as a whole - and for that, the movie did a great job.
1 comment:
I loved this movie! Well, as much as you can love a movie about this topic. Highly recommended!
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