UNBROKEN  is a decent movie, a good one that tried to be great. Certainly the makings were there, given the amazing story elements of Louis Zamperini’s cat-with-9-lives (make that a hundred) survival, told brilliantly in the bestseller by Laura Hillenbrand.  Director Angelina Jolie made it a labor of love. We think she miscalculated in that Zamperini’s life covered so much ground that a mini-series, say eight hours worth, would have been a better vehicle than a theatrical release in a truncated 137 minutes. The film does an acceptable job of visiting the first segments of the Olympic runner/war hero’s life, undisciplined child morphing into incredible athlete, then skirts quickly over his first military experiences. For the remainder of the script (written by the Coen brothers) it then concentrates on his brutal years of captivity as a POW of the Japanese. Jolie and the Coen’s leave out the last seven decades of his life, brushed over with a few fade-out paragraphs (he died, at 97, a few months before the movie came out in 2014). The sincere and compelling film received muted applause from the tiresome Angie-bashing contingent. Their sour grapes aside, it could be subtitled Unfulfilled or Unfinished, given the vast amount of experiences Zamperini underwent.

Production values are strong (they spent around $65,000,000), the special effects are splendid, all technical credits commendable. As Zamperini, Jack O’Connell handles it adeptly, though as written he has little to do but endure: minus the latter sections of the protagonists life—battles with PTSD and alcohol and then his religious conversion and journey of reconciliation to Japan—what is left is a series of torment-vignettes in assorted Rising Sun prison camps. Mean as they are, they only touch on the grotesque surface of conditions he and countless POWs went through. Audiences simply could not take it.*

With Miyavi (as the psychopathic ‘Bird’, who got away with it), Domhnall Gleeson and Garrett Hedlund. The draw was $161,000,000 worldwide, with Oscar nominations for Cinematography, Sound Editing and Sound Mixing.

* If audiences couldn’t handle more than brush at the brutish truth, it’s rank despicable that the Japanese government can’t either, since little more than a sake-thimble of integrity has owned up to WW2 atrocities vast and savage enough to make the Nazis puke. Merciless math: as an Allied soldier captured by Hitler, chances of dying in captivity were one in 28. If you fell into the arms of the Japanese, it was one in four. If you were Chinese, odds of living through the captivity were one in 100. Lest the Empire’s racist/militarist/sexist horror story be softened by nervous knee-jerk jerks into some kind of apologia that bemoans ‘Japan-bashing’, we suggest reading the book.

If Japan’s dodge of honor isn’t bad enough: after 1958, all those imprisoned or accused of war crimes in the Pacific were pardoned in full. Japan pulled this vile skate with complete imprimatur from good old Uncle Sam. Seems our anti-Red military-industrial complex needed Mitsubishi’s help against the Godless Commies. What are ruined lives, and a trifle like ‘justice’ next to political expediency?  Forget Old Tokyo: our own governments from Truman on, Republican and Democrat alike, have done everything they can to prevent people like Zamperini from ever receiving compensation or even acknowledgement from those who treated them so fiendishly.