Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very, very sad., 27 April 2008
Without doubt one of the best films I've seen but I'd never be able to sit through it again. Gone is the possitive message of Schindler's List, instead we have an honest look at what we are really like as a species. Anger, fear and futility predominate throughout. All aparently based on fact. The poor sods that took part in the rebellion should be remembered for what they did yet we prefer to build monuments to rich gernerals. It's alright to get all pasificst and hippy about violence and such stuff but what they were up against was intolerable.I was depressed for about three days after this film but it was worth it. All the actors perform incredibly well. Harvey Keital is terrifying as the camp functionary who has no illusiones about what awaits him when the war ends. Yet still he carries on. Almost too bad to be true it defies belief that a civilized bunch like the Germans were capable of such horror.It will break your heart but watch it.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Story about the Sonderkommandos in Auschwitz, 3 May 2008
Tim Blake Nelson, the director of "The Grey Zone" (USA 2001), states that this is not a movie about the Holocaust. It is about the choices a human being is ready to make in order to stay alive - even if it is just for a little while longer.
The central figure is Dr. Miklos Nyiszli, a Hungarian Jew who assisted with Josef Mengele's infamous experiments. The events are based on his records and on notes of members of the "Sonderkommandos". They take place in Auschwitz, 1944.
The SS dropped the Zyklon B into the gas chambers - everything else was done by Jewish prisoners: leading the victims into the changing rooms, assuring them they were going to have a shower, locking them in.
Then, afterwards, collecting the bodies and burning them in the crematoria ovens.
There was even leisure time for them to play chess or to enjoy the items they were able to loot.
And the question for the viewer becomes: how would you have chosen?
The impact of this film results from it's coolness, it's unsentimentality. It is much worse than "Schindler's list" or "The Pianist". Those were stories of survivors.
The movie was shot in Bulgaria and the extras were recruited from the region. They were queuing up for roles women had to shave their heads for and people lying naked on top of each other as "human lettuce" in the gas chamber (information from the bonus material).
If you want to learn about the death camps in the third Reich - watch the BBC series on Auschwitz. If you want to understand more - watch this.
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6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A flawed film, 9 Dec 2008
I wish I could praise this film, I really do. The historical events that lie behind it deserve more talent than those who made it seem to possess. Major flaws weaken what might have been a great film.
First, probably in an effort to `improve' the story, they muddle the history. There was a teenaged girl who did miraculously survive the gas chambers at Auschwitz, but that was at a different time and her fate was not that portrayed in the film. Bringing her into a revolt by the inmates who ran Nazism's machinery of death merely confuses the plot. Will she be saved or will the plot to destroy the crematoria succeed? The writers and directors never settle on which they want to portray, and the result is a mess.
Second, those who made this film seem captive their own culture and place in history, unaware that any other exists. Most of those involved in these historical events were born in Eastern Europe in the first three decades of the twentieth century. That was a culture far different from our own. In the film, they are portrayed as acting and sounding like they were born our West coast in the last decades of the twentieth century. They're vain, self-obsessed and foul-mouthed with small and petty egos.
I'm not talking about a lack of the slight Hungarian accents that more talented filmmakers might have added to lend a bit of realism. The problem is not that most of the characters have modern American accents. The problem is that their attitudes and the content of what they're saying is that of today's Los Angeles rather than the Budapest of long ago. Their debates about what to do have all the sallowness of those waiting in line to get tickets for a rock concert. The result rings untrue.
Finally, there's a general sloppiness about the plot. Attempting to portray those who wanted to use the revolt to escape as selfish makes no sense. The Nazis could not permit any eyewitness to the inner workings of their death camps to remain free and would have to take soldiers out of action to recapture them. Those who escaped would be helping to defeat Germany as effectively as those who remained to destroyed the machinery of death. There's also Hollywood's usual ignorance of weapons. Actors in the film shoot people at long ranges with pistols with an accuracy that would have won them a gold medal at the Olympics. Other blunders are even more serious. No German officer in these camps would have placed women being brutally tortured to make them talk in a situation where they could end their misery in an instant by throwing themselves on an electric fence. A bit more care with the script would have weeded those errors out.
In the end, the significance of what these people were doing in 1944 does make up for the inadequacies of those making the film in 2001, but this film could have been much better in more talented hands.
--Michael W. Perry, editor of Dachau Liberated : The Official Report
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