“But Jews do not fight.”
“These Jews do.”

A very late review of this and no notes to go on except the above quote. What I always like, expect, and usually get from Edward Zwick’s movies (okay, I’ve only seen Glory, Last Samurai, the slightly anomalous The Seige and Blood Diamond before this) – and I probably always say it in my reviews – is how he really gets the blood, sweat and tears of his stories onto the celluloid, and this one’s no exception. A lot of the reviews I read focussed on how it tells a story that’s not nearly as known as it should be, and that’s true – however, this in itself for me isn’t cause for a 2 hour feature. Where the power of Defiance comes from most for me is in that line above. How relieving to know that not all Jewish people of this time and situation just accepted what happened to them as “God’s will” or something the way it’s so often depicted.

Daniel Craig does the “not-Bond” thing far more convincingly than others have especially while still in the thick of that role, and Liev Schreiber and Jamie Bell are as good as ever too. The score is full of noodling violins that you’d expect from a story like this but it works, and the photography is pretty beautiful too.

Tags: Holocaust, Jews, Russian, war

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 at 9:06 pm and is filed under 4 hearts, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.