Louis Zamperini’s death this past July triggered an international outpouring of grief on a scale typically reserved for the death of movie stars or royals. It makes sense. In his own way, Zamperini, who was ninety-seven years old, served as both rock star and royal. An Olympic champion runner in his youth, he survived years of torture in a World War II Japanese prisoner of war camp – not to mention forty-seven days adrift in the ocean after a plane crash – and went on to become an inspirational speaker and youth worker who radiated enough love that he touched even the most ardent of cynics. It’s not surprising that a biopic has been made about his life. It’s surprising that such a biopic hasn’t been made before.
“Unbroken,” which covers Zamperini’s life from his inauspicious childhood until his 1945 release from the camps, is Angelina Jolie’s third directorial effort. It is also by far Jolie’s strongest directorial effort – at least in part because brothers Ethan and Joel Coen shaped Laura Hillenbrand’s gripping, eponymous biography into a script so sinewy that it would be hard to screw up its epic story of survival.
The film begins with a bang, literally: We’re on a B-24 sent out on a U.S. bombing raid of a Japanese-held island in the Pacific. Continue Reading →
