Tuesday, July 07, 2009

Defiance

In preparation for our upcoming vacation I watched Defiance. It's one of my Netflix movies and if I watched it quickly I would be able to return and get a DVD that both Ginger and I want to watch for the beach (which at this point is MI:5, a.k.a. Spooks).

The story for Defiance is set in WW II and follows a group of Jews living in the woods trying to avoid the Nazis. The group is led by James Bond and Sabertooth. Ok, I recently saw Quantum of Solace and X-Men Origins: Wolverine and seeing two actors from those movies in this one made it tough to really immerse myself in this movie. I'm not saying that Daniel Craig can never play another role, but at this point when I see him it's going to be hard to get past the fact that this is the actor that plays James Bond.

Ok, so the movie is really about three Jewish brothers whose families are slaughtered by the Nazis. They go into hiding foraging for food and simply trying to survive in the woods. As time goes on their group grows in size and they have to contend with the responsibility of trying keeping everyone alive. It's not exactly a happy movie considering the subject matter. When I see movies like this that show the impossible conditions these people had to live with in the past it makes some the issues I've got pale in comparison (suddenly not being able to copy files off the TiVo doesn't seem like such a hardship).

The movie really gets across the harsh conditions these people had to go through to survive. The story seems more like a documentary at times than a story piece. And as I said before if you've seen the main actors in other movies it's a bit tough get past that at times watching the film. And the conflict and resolution at the end seems contrived and like it might have been exaggerated to make for a more suspenseful movie, but since I don't know the actual history it's really hard to say.

1 comment:

wtfree3 said...

Here's the story that inspired the movie: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98759355. Makes for interesting reading.