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在线翻译:
szdaily -> Movies -> 
Unbroken
    2015-02-06  08:53    Shenzhen Daily

    What Jolie succeeds in doing to a substantial degree is representing her hero’s physical ordeal and his tenacious refusal to give up when it would have been very easy to do so.

    A GREAT true story is telescoped down to a merely good one in “Unbroken.” After a dynamite first half-hour, Angelina Jolie’s accomplished second outing as a director slowly loses steam as it chronicles the inhuman dose of suffering endured by Olympic runner Louie Zamperini in Japanese internment camps during World War II. Wonderfully acted by Jack O’Connell in the leading role and guided with a steady hand by Jolie without unduly inflating the heroics or injecting maudlin cliches, this will be a tough film for some to take. But it also has strong appeal as an extraordinary survival story.

    Jolie’s spectacularly noncommercial first feature, the 2011 Bosnian war drama, “In the Land of Blood and Honey,” nonetheless proved that she could direct, an assertion more than confirmed by the vivid you-are-there opening of “Unbroken.” Without preamble, the film puts you on board a B-24, one of many sent out on a U.S. bombing raid of a Japanese-held island in the Pacific. There’s a real sense of the heaviness of the metal that somehow defies gravity as it grinds through the air, as well as an intense awareness of how all the men, from the guys in the cockpit, to the exposed gunners in their turrets, to the bombardier, Zamperini, depend upon each other to do their jobs.

    Speed, in fact, is the essence of Zamperini’s life, to which flashbacks to his youth in Torrance, Southern California, attest. A little Italian-speaking troublemaker during the Depression, young Zamperini (a likeable C.J. Valleroy) is pushed by his older brother Pete (first John D’Leo, then Alex Russell) to take up track, where he becomes such a sensation that he eventually makes the 1936 U.S. Olympic team. The brilliantly staged crippled landing of the initial bombing expedition spookily foreshadows a second flight, a search for lost fliers in a patched together plane that, in a harrowing scene, makes a crash landing and breaks up in the middle of the Pacific. The only survivors are Zamperini, his blond pilot buddy Phil (Domhnall Gleeson) and a new crewman they don’t really know, Mac (Finn Wittrock), who array themselves on two yellow life rafts and hope for the best.

    As realistically as the men’s deprivations are depicted in the film, the half-hour the film spends at sea simply can’t render the sheer, slow agony the book so effectively conveys — the doubts, struggles, delirium, mood swings, surpassing hunger and thirst, and constant sense of peril.

    More than one moment of pain awaits Zamperini, unfortunately, at his next destination, a jungle hellhole where he and Phil are stashed in separate cells barely big enough to contain them. Unlike Hillenbrand’s book, the film is unable to convey the staggering misery they were forced to endure in the form of dysentery and other diseases, infinitesimal rations, enforced silence and perpetual fear. The only sort of punishment Jolie seems confident to present cinematically is of the corporal persuasion, which is what Louie encounters repeatedly at the hands of new camp commandant Wantanabe (Miyavi), nicknamed “The Bird.”

    The large cell block in the new camp allows its inmates to talk, share rumors and otherwise fraternize in a way that takes a lot of the edge off despite their jeopardy. Nothing we see conveys the grave threat the men were constantly under.

    Transferred to yet another camp, Zamperini is pushed to the virtual breaking point, leading to a climactic scene which, the way Jolie stages it, throws off unmistakable crucifixion reverberations.

    One other great moment from the book that, oddly, doesn’t turn up onscreen is the American prisoners noticing a spectacular sight in the far distance, which turns out to be one of the atomic bomb explosions that soon brought the war to an end. It’s hard to imagine this wouldn’t have made for an arresting, even surreal visual interlude.

    What Jolie succeeds in doing to a substantial degree is representing her hero’s physical ordeal and his tenacious refusal to give up when it would have been very easy to do so. What she and her more than estimable quarter of screenwriters — Joel and Ethan Coen, Richard LaGravenese and William Nicholson — have not entirely pulled off is dramatizing the full range of Zamperini’s internal suffering, emotional responses and survival mechanisms. Nor have they made any of the secondary characters pop from the anonymous background of prisoner extras.

    Just recently recognized outside the U.K. due to his work in “Starred Up and 300: Rise of an Empire,” O’Connell is a pleasure to watch at all times here. The flashy role of the dreaded Bird is charismatically filled by Japanese singer Miyavi. Jolie could have done a bit more to build up the character’s mythology and the sense of dread he imparts. But the young actor, working mostly in English, has a beauty and good sense of timing that serve him well in this malevolent part.

    The movie is now being screened in Shenzhen. (SD-Agencies)

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