#The railway man movie reviews full
It starts off simply enough as a period romance between Eric and his often confounded lover Patti (Nicole Kidman), but it rushes through their courting to get to the full blown trauma when she witnesses a full blown nightmare on their honeymoon night. It’s a personal, character based story, but the actual structure of what happens is overly simplistic. It gets the tone and look of a war movie bang on, but Jonathan Teplitzky’s work here always feels a little too slight to generate any genuine gravitas to sell the drama of the situation. Years later he confronts his demons when he learns that his tormentor from the war is still alive. It’s the true story of Eric Lomax (Colin Firth as an adult and Jeremy Irvine as his younger surrogate in flashbacks), a British soldier captured during World War II who endured some of the most horribly gruelling conditions imaginable as a forced labourer on the Thailand Death Railway. It’s far more personal than epic, showing the scars that some soldiers and prisoners on both sides carry long after the violence and the conflict have ended. Review by Erik Samdahl unless otherwise indicated.While not without some pacing problems, the life during and after wartime drama The Railway Man works well. The movie's sometimes understated approach keeps it from being anything more than that, however. The Railway Man tells an interesting true story and is supported by a trio of good performances. The scenes between Firth and Hiroyuki Sanada, who plays his former captor Takeshi Nagase, are disappointing and feel overly melodramatic compared to the rest of the movie. The scenes amount to a lot of talking without much depth, opting for stodgy moments where Kidman, as Lomax's wife, attempts to dig deeper into her husband's psyche and Stellan Skarsgaard appears to advance the plot by telling us what happened to Lomax. The weakest aspect of The Railway Man are the “modern day” scenes, which has Firth trying to come to terms with what happened to him. Kidman is great but disappears for large periods of time. Firth is good but understated, much like the film. Irvine is great in the flashbacks, but his role seems to exist primarily to demonstrate the terrible torture Lomax was subjected to. All three actors deliver strong performances, though none are standouts given the subject matter. Each individual segment of the movie is good but not amazing, and yet director Jonathan Teplitzky finds synergy in the combination of said pieces.įirth and Jeremy Irvine play the old and young Lomax respectively, while Kidman plays his wife.
The movie succeeds largely thanks to the fascinating source material. Based on the autobiography of the same name by Eric Lomax, The Railway Man depicts extreme torture of British POWs and the psychological effects torture can have on men decades later. The Railway Man is a well acted piece of film that most notably tells a shockingly brutal true story of torture and survival. Nicole Kidman also stars, because why not. That's the message (well, not really) in The Railway Man, a drama about a former British Army officer who discovers that the man responsible for much of his brutal treatment in a Japanese prisoner camp during World War II is still alive. Now available on Blu-ray and DVD ( Buy on Amazon)ĭon't mess with Colin Firth, because he will mess with you.
0 kommentar(er)
