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"Unbroken" Movie - 12/25/2014 (1 Viewer)

The Passion of the Runner...we already know how its gonna end, he doesn't die. Jolie has put me off from wanting to see her do much of anything now.

 
Wow, somehow I have lived a cave and never heard of him. Definitely want to pick up the book. I also can't believe how he was able to forgive his captors.

 
Agree. Fantastic book. Wonderful author (I thoroughly enjoyed SeaBiscuit even though I care nothing of horse racing.) Not sure about the movie, but I hope it will be good.

 
Looks like Zamperini befriended Matt Barkley while he was USC. Barkley is speaking about him on twitter.

 
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Love this quote from Zamperini, "After the book was finished, all of my college buddies were dead, all of my war buddies were dead -- it's sad to realize you've lost all of your friends," said Zamperini. "But I think I made up for it. I made a new friend -- Angelina Jolie. The gal really loves me. She hugs me and kisses me, so I can't complain."

What an incredible man.

 
A quote I once read reminds me of Louis' story:

"I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well."

 
JohnW1970 said:
One of the most incredible stories I have ever read. That book is almost unbelievable.
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Put Endurance: Shackelton's Incredible Voyage on your list. Both are spectacular works of non-fiction and both are so unreal there's no way you'd believe it if you didn't know they were real stories.

 
For his 81st birthday in January 1998, Zamperini ran a leg in the Olympic Torch relay for the Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, not far from the POW camp where he had been held. While there, he attempted to meet with his chief and most brutal tormentor during the war, Mutsuhiro Watanabe, who had evaded prosecution as a war criminal, but the latter refused to see him.[citation needed] In March 2005, Zamperini returned to Germany to visit the Berlin Olympic Stadium for the first time since he competed there.[22]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0pulc6kDsk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVFsx9fA19w

 
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The book is $4.99 on iTunes. I have heard the book is amazing and think I am going to take that route for this story and wait for the movie on rental.

 
Awesome book, read it! Incredible story and fairly tells the story of Japanese cruelty in WW2 which equaled that of the nazis. Good to get that history out there, but overall this is a very inspiring and true story.

 
Good Posting Judge said:
It's the same author who helped Seabiscuit write his autobiography, and that was really good. :shrug:
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True.

What's weird is that Zamp's story is amazing but the retelling of it falls flat. Not sure what it is. I don't even think it is the writing.

My brother just posted on FB that he didn't enjoy the movie because they seemed to skip over the part about Zamperini finding Jeebus. :mellow:

 
Mario Kart said:
For his 81st birthday in January 1998, Zamperini ran a leg in the Olympic Torch relay for the Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, not far from the POW camp where he had been held. While there, he attempted to meet with his chief and most brutal tormentor during the war, Mutsuhiro Watanabe, who had evaded prosecution as a war criminal, but the latter refused to see him.[citation needed] In March 2005, Zamperini returned to Germany to visit the Berlin Olympic Stadium for the first time since he competed there.[22]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0pulc6kDsk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVFsx9fA19w
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Former Track Star, POW, Doesn't Get Closure at 81 in His Return to JapanThe old wounds, physical and spiritual, healed long ago.

When Lou Zamperini returned to Japan recently, it was in the spirit of forgiveness and reconciliation.

If any American during World War II had earned the right to hate, it was Louis Silvie Zamperini.

Once one of America's best track and field athletes, he was beaten almost daily for 2 1/2 years in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps and fed a near-starvation diet.

But there was no hate in his heart when he visited Japan recently, to appear in a CBS feature about his POW experience, to be shown during the Winter Olympics.

The other focal point of the CBS piece was to have been a Japanese sergeant, Matsuhiro Watanabe. It was Watanabe who kicked, beat and whipped Zamperini and other Americans almost daily during their internment.

"Watanabe was classified as a Class A war criminal after the war, but he avoided trial by hiding out in the mountains near Nagano in a cabin, until the statute of limitations ran out," said Zamperini, who lives in Hollywood and is a youth counselor at Hollywood First Presbyterian Church.

CBS, which had planned the Zamperini/Watanabe piece for more than a year, hoped to film the two in a moment of reconciliation, but it didn't happen on Zamperini's first visit two weeks ago.

"A lot of people in Japan would see this piece and I wanted to meet with him, and smooth it out for him and his family," Zamperini, 81, said.

"I didn't want him to do any bowing and scraping. I just wanted to tell him I'd forgiven him--just the two of us, maybe over lunch, talking about the Olympics, the future of our families and such.

"But his son said no to any meeting. That was a mistake, because now he'll be seen as a bad guy in his own country, and I wanted to spare him that. See, guys who worked under him were hanged as war criminals. Watanabe avoided all that."

During his Japan visit, townspeople where one of the camps was located honored Zamperini with a banquet.

"I was overwhelmed, literally swept off my feet," he said.

"They were beautiful people. They wanted me to speak, but I choked up. I couldn't get a word out.

"That warmth they showed me more than compensated for the suffering I had in those camps."

"The Zamp," as track teammates at Torrance High and USC called him, was a big-name Los Angeles athlete in the 1930s.

After setting a national high school mile record of 4 minutes 21.2 seconds, he went to USC and made the 1936 U.S. Olympic team as an 18-year-old. At Berlin, he finished eighth in the 5,000 meters.

Zamperini's World War II imprisonment is heartbreaking, considering how he got there.

Some headlines, from the Zamperini clipping file:

"Lt. Zamperini Missing in Action; Reported Lost in South Pacific Since May 27"--June 2, 1943.

"Zamperini Voice Reported Heard on Enemy Broadcast"--Nov. 21, 1944.

"Zamperini Alive! Sends Message Home"--March 7, 1945.

"Zamperini Survived 47 Days on Raft in Pacific; Gives Details of Crash, Survival Ordeal in Ocean, Capture, Prison Camp Torture"--Sept. 9, 1945.

Zamperini was a bombardier on a rescue mission south of Hawaii on May 27, 1943, when his plane crashed. He spent 47 days drifting in the Pacific in a life raft, beginning the ordeal with two other crew members, completing it with only one.

They had little water and tried to fish for food, often unsuccessfully because the sharks around them would bite off what they had caught.

On the 33rd day, one of the three men died and was buried at sea. And on the 47th day, after drifting perhaps 1,500 miles, they were picked up by a Japanese patrol boat at the southernmost part of the Marshall Islands.

By that time, Zamperini was down to about 70 pounds, unable to stand.

In 1984, Zamperini gave a detailed look at his ordeal to The Times. Portions of that are repeated here:

"There were 11 of us and eight were killed outright [in the crash]. I was trapped under a machine gun mount and slipped briefly into unconsciousness while my part of the plane began to sink.

"I came up swallowing sea water, fuel and oil. . . . I was groping blindly with my hands, trying to get a handhold. My SC ring got hung up on broken glass on a window. It cut my finger to the bone, but I had a handhold.

" . . . On the 27th day a Japanese bomber appeared overhead. It made several strafing passes over us and we all got in the water, under the raft. Not one of us was hit, but the raft was full of holes.

"In the survival kit, we had patching gear but no knife. So we fashioned a pair of pliers.

"The seawater had washed the sand off the sandpaper, so the patches leaked. For the rest of the drift, we had water in the raft and had to hand-pump around the clock. One guy would pump 10 minutes, then rest 20. That's when the sharks showed up.

"During the day, it was blue and mako sharks all over the place. At night, 15-footers came in.

"I don't know what kind they were, but we were in constant, horrible fear. Sometimes one would put its head right up on the raft and look at us. We'd whack them on the nose with the paddles.
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http://articles.latimes.com/1998/feb/19/sports/sp-20790

 
I thought the book was great. I haven't seen the movie yet but I don't have high hopes for it. The problem is that what makes his story so amazing is the totality of it, from his childhood all the way through to his old age. There is no way it could be properly condensed into a 2 1/2 hour movie.

If they were going to attempt it, they should have at least hired a more experienced director.

 
Agree the book is a good read. I was stoked to see this movie but reading some of the reviews, I'll wait for the rental. Maybe if they made it one of those History channel mini-series it would be better. Seems it would be hard to tell that story in a two hour movie.

 
"Good said:
That Watanabe guy stuck to his guns his whole life, seems like he's the real Unbroken.
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The guy was a sadistic, fascist, racist so yeah like your basic concentration camp guard hiding out in some random suburban duplex or an Argrentinian farm for 50 years, if "unbroken" means evading justice then ok.

 
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SaintsInDome2006 said:
Awesome book, read it! Incredible story and fairly tells the story of Japanese cruelty in WW2 which equaled that of the nazis. Good to get that history out there, but overall this is a very inspiring and true story.
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Haven't seen the movie, but we listened to the audiobook and thought it was fantastic. The one bit of history that I didn't know:

I had no idea there was an all-kill order for the quarter million Allied POWs in effect, nor did I know that the a-bomb effectively stopped that from being carried out. It really cemented my thinking that dropping those two bombs was the right thing to do.
 
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SaintsInDome2006 said:
"Good said:
That Watanabe guy stuck to his guns his whole life, seems like he's the real Unbroken.
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The guy wasa sadistic, fascist racist so yeah like Your basic concentration camp guard hiding out in some random suburban duplex or an Argrebtinian farm for 50 years, so yeah "unbroken" means evading justice then ok.
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I'm not saying he was a good guy, I'm saying that he stuck to his guns.

 
I read devil at my heels in 3 days, I really couldn't put the book down and even took work breaks to get in some reading time.

 
Good Posting Judge said:
SaintsInDome2006 said:
"Good said:
That Watanabe guy stuck to his guns his whole life, seems like he's the real Unbroken.
Click to expand...
The guy wasa sadistic, fascist racist so yeah like Your basic concentration camp guard hiding out in some random suburban duplex or an Argrebtinian farm for 50 years, so yeah "unbroken" means evading justice then ok.
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I'm not saying he was a good guy, I'm saying that he stuck to his guns.
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I'm trying to imagine a John Demjanjuk being described as having "stuck to his guns" but ok.

 
SaintsInDome2006 said:
Awesome book, read it! Incredible story and fairly tells the story of Japanese cruelty in WW2 which equaled that of the nazis. Good to get that history out there, but overall this is a very inspiring and true story.
Click to expand...
This is what I took from the book - didn't know a lot about what the Japanese did during the war. Really messed up.

Good read, didn't really see how it would translate into a movie.

 
The General said:
SaintsInDome2006 said:
Awesome book, read it! Incredible story and fairly tells the story of Japanese cruelty in WW2 which equaled that of the nazis. Good to get that history out there, but overall this is a very inspiring and true story.
Click to expand...
This is what I took from the book - didn't know a lot about what the Japanese did during the war. Really messed up.

Good read, didn't really see how it would translate into a movie.
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Bataan Death March, comfort girls, mutilating US soldiers, slaughtering the Chinese. They were evil ####ers.

 
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I thought it was an amazing book.

The stuff that he went through, someone was looking over him.

The movie, it was good. But it needed to be a miniseries

or something like that, to do it justice.

Chris

 
I saw the movie yesterday and thought it was ok. It was good for the first hour, but it dragged the second hour.

 
Jayrok said:
Agree the book is a good read. I was stoked to see this movie but reading some of the reviews, I'll wait for the rental.
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Exactly how I feel. Doesn't sound like I'm going to be blown away by the movie version, so I'll catch it as a rental.

 
cphk96 said:
I thought it was an amazing book.

The stuff that he went through, someone was looking over him.

The movie, it was good. But it needed to be a miniseries

or something like that, to do it justice.

Chris
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A Band of Brother-esque series would have been excellent.

 
CGRdrJoe said:
I read devil at my heels in 3 days, I really couldn't put the book down and even took work breaks to get in some reading time.
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I heard this is the better of the two books and spends a good amount of time focusing on his post WW2 days and spiritual revival. Bought it on Amazon and received today.

 
SaintsInDome2006 said:
Awesome book, read it! Incredible story and fairly tells the story of Japanese cruelty in WW2 which equaled that of the nazis. Good to get that history out there, but overall this is a very inspiring and true story.
Click to expand...
Its one of the best books I read last year. The story just blows you away.However, I'll wait for it on PPV.

 
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