Film review: Angelina Jolie's Unbroken - a powerful war drama
Actress' second outing as a director shows her to be a talented filmmaker
Starring: Jack O'Connell,Takamasa Ishihara
Director: Angelina Jolie
Category: IIB (English, Japanese and Italian)
Is all well in the Pitt-Jolie household? After husband Brad Pitt's turn in brutal war film Fury comes Angelina Jolie's Unbroken, a powerful and relentless prisoner-of-war camp drama which doesn't shrink from showing the inhumane treatment meted out by the Japanese to their captives. The actress's second film as a director shows her to be a talented filmmaker, and one unafraid to take on a subject like human cruelty and treat it in an unconventional way.
Unbroken is a true story based on the picaresque life of Louis Zamperini (Jack O'Connell), a young Italian-American runner who represented the US at the 1936 Olympics in Nazi-ruled Berlin.
When America entered the second world war, he joined the air force as a bombardier, flying missions against Japanese bases.
The film opens with such a mission, in which the B-24 Liberator bomber that Zamperini was on board has to crash-land. Then it flashes back to show his early life, in which he suffered ethnic discrimination in the US, and his time at the Olympics, before moving forward to detail his reassignment to Hawaii.
