Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by Joe S on April 18, 2000 at 14:45:49:

In Reply to: Not a problem posted by Victor Khomenko on April 18, 2000 at 14:23:47:

I see where you are coming from, but I suspect that the people who made this movie were being true to the US experience in their own way. Witin its narrow context (US POWs) the comments I have seen from American prisoners to charcaterize their experience was precisely, to take your own word, one of "boredom". They were not terrorized by their captors - which was one of the reasons the US was so I'll prepared for what happened to POWs in Korea, where the US simply expected that their prisoners would be treated according to the Geneva convention as had already been the case with the Germans. (Why they forgot the lesson of what the Japanese did is beyond me.)

In that regard I think you put the film makers on the horns of a dilemma here - do they tell a story of prisoners sitting out years of war in tolerable and immensly boring conditions with the occaisional escape (definitely accurate to history)? Or transform the pic into a concentration camp picture with brutality that didnt exist in the US POW situation? In either case you must expect that contrievances will be added to make a movie that will engage an audience. But which do you choose as a starting point? Which is propoganda and which is truth in that context?

I suspect that expecting any film to capture the full breadth of experience and destructiveness (both human and material) of war is asking too much of any one film - particularly in the case of a war of the scope & brutality of WW2. But who knows, maybe someone will do it someday...

joe