The Railway Man [DVD] [2013] [2017]

Firstly, the one star rating reviewer known only as C, so, this true story about the life and torture off true men is boring and rubbish! I can easily guess what the C stands for...I bet you truly are trash! The world could do without worms like you, you are certainly someone with no honour and very little compassion...tu*d! This film is a tribute to the heroes, real men, for who the scars of war never healed. They must have lived with their torture everyday until they died. I have not read the book, I can only imagine it is very hard reading indeed. We could not possibly imagine the mental and physical abuse they suffered. Their story needs to be remembered, the politics we disgustingly let our MPs get away with today sours the memory off those in the armed forces who actually did and still do represent us and our country...and ultimately die for what they believe in...us! This should be taught in the history classes in our schools, not the cr*p they teach now. Men like this are the reason why lefty liberals are allowed to speak so freely and protest in such an abysmal manner today. We have allowed their memory to fade and we should all be ashamed. This film has a great cast, an emotional and heartbreaking hell for those railway men. Without spoilers the ending is powerful and righteous for two men that became great friends. Most of our second world war heroes are nearly all gone, we and they deserve the right to fight and protect their bravery, tell their story so they are never forgotten. Without our Army, Navy, RAF and the contributions from their nans, mums, wives and girlfriends back home we may well be railwaymen/women ourselves or most probably not even here at all. A definite must watch!

The British 14th Army defending the empire in the far east which included Burma, Malaya and Singapore was defeated by the Japanese army which prior to the campaign was looked upon with contempt by the British but events from 1941 to 1945 proved that this underestimate had disasterous consequences for those who went into captivity. Prisoners of war were routinely tortured and treated as slaves and thousands died during the building of the Burma to Siam railway. Many of the survivors of the war were pychologically damaged and deeply truamatised for the rest of their lives by their experiences in captivity. Eric Lomax (played by Colin Firth) was one of these men and when he was told that the man who served as an interpretor in the POW camp,Takashi Nagashe (played by Hiroyuki Sanada) was not only still alive but was working in Burma showing tourists around the site of the railway he decided to return there and seek retribution.I knew about Lomax from a documentary I saw several years ago so I was interested to see how the story would be told by a feature film. I was very impressed and found The Railway Man impressive and deeply moving. Colin Firth in particular was superb and the reconstruction of the POW camp was brillianlty conceived and conveyed how brutal the Japanese were with their prisoners. Japanese soldiers regarded surrender as the worst kind of shame so they had no regard for British soldiers who allowed themselves to become prisoners or war and they meted out cruel and degrading treatment to their captors whenever they could.There have been many films made about the second world war in Europe but very few about what happened in the far east, the notable exception being The Bridge on the River Kwai. The 14th Army have been called the forgotten army because their role in the war was never as well known to the British public as that of the armies who fought nearer home in Europe and it is good that this film seeks to show the suffering of the soldiers who fought in this far off theatre of war in Asia.The Railway Man is about man's inhumanity to man but from this can come not hatred and emnity but reconciliation and some kind of closure.

The first thing about the film, The Railway Man, is that it is based on Eric Lomax's book rather than stay true to it, so if you have read it and expect it to conform to the facts you will be at times be confused and wondering if you missed out a couple of pages, and nearly feeling a shade disappointed. I think that is how I nearly felt about The Railway Man, but it managed to pick up just as the disappointment began to seep in.Overall, the acting, directing and narrative, told through sensibly paced flashbacks, all work fine and Colin Firth's Eric is a solid if unexciting piece of acting: I was crying out for Kenneth Branagh every time he appeared on screen, as he is an actor of about the same age would has the ability to articulate inner angst like few others - think Wallander. The fact is that Firth is out-gunned by nearly all the other cast, especially Nicole Kidman, and his younger self, a first class performance by James Irvine, and Firth appears to get younger and younger as the film goes along, until he ends up looking exactly like Colin Firth in real life.Lomax's story is now well known, and after reading about the horrors he and his fellow prisoners endured under internment by the Japanese they defy imagination and we are offered a glimpse of this after his capture, but never does the film dwell too long on this and the experience would be almost impossible to bring to the screen in a main-line feature film. What we do see, including the torture of Lomax is broken up with Lomax trying to come to terms with his past life set in the present day.The Railway Man's main weakness is its time-lines. In the opening part of the film Lomax and Patti Wallace, his future wife, are on a train and I immediately thought this was set somewhere in the late sixties, but in fact it is supposed to be in the early eighties - Lomax was around sixty at the time but he looks like a secondary school geography teacher in his mid-forties. Also, all the supporting screens in the British Legion Club and Lomax's house all have the feel of a decade earlier and they never seem to get it right.The film's other problem is when the adaption veers totally away from the facts and the over-dramatization or Hollywood treatment of the bones of the story make it implausible and bordering on the melodramatic, especially in the confrontation with Lomax and one of his former torturers, played brilliantly by Hiroyuki Sanada. The script writers also decided to skip over the fact that Eric Lomax had been married before and had children before he met Patti and surely this knowledge would have given us a greater insight into Lomax's troubled psyche as he wrestled with the demons which haunted him day and night.Overall though, this is a well acted and watchable film, but might have been far better if more consideration had gone into what was Lomax's real story rather than a Hollywood take on it; wasn't it powerful enough without the added scenes which never happened? Colin Firth is very good but another actor could have been far better, and it is worth mentioning that John Hurt played Lomax in a brilliant TV play call Prisoners in Time, and he managed to convey the inner torment and suppression of his torment so well.I would like to have given this film three stars but untimely the message of the film which is to stop the hatred and forgive is worth the extra one and bears as much relevance as ever today, and Eric Lomax's story is now more widely known though this film and that is a fitting tribute to a remarkable man.

I bought this film in amazon. Spain assuming that I can play it in Spain. However it is prohibited in Spain and can only be played in America. This was not specified anywhere except looking back it does have USA in brackets but this was not specified as meaning a disc region formate. I’m sooo not impressed as it’s not clear enough to the costumer.

Emotional and moving. Based on a true story. A must-watch!

This film is a didactic dramatization of a difficult and painful real life experience of the traumas of war. The film is also a powerful and extremely effective film about penitence, compassion, and forgiveness, qualities which are rare and difficult to either express or achieve.This film lasts 108 minutes. One has to watch the traumatic first 100 minutes to fully understand and appreciate the powerful and cathartic final few minutes. The penitence portion came first, contributing to the compassion and forgiveness that follows.In the film, a now disillusioned, former Japanese officer says to his wartime victim, "We were lied to" - which as a historian, I knew was true, that the militarist Japanese government lied on a colossal scale to the Japanese population for much of WWII, about the disastrous turn of the war against Japan. That deceit is depicted in a few second clip toward the end of the film; in the few seconds I saw that clip, which occurred during an indoor torture session, my perspective of the Japanese officer significantly changed. Who - including a possible Buddhist - wants to abuse an "enemy" when lied to by one's own government?Speaking from a Japanese ethos, the Japanese officer also says to his wartime victim, who had been a POW in Japanese captivity, "You NEVER surrendered."The flashbacks in the initial part of the film include a sequence when the British military take control of the Japanese POW camp at the end of the war. The British are asking each Japanese prisoner "Are you Kempeitai?" The Kempeitai was the infamous and brutal Japanese secret military police, who were responsible for the administration of POW camps. When the Kempeitai Japanese officer is asked this question, he denies that he is Kempeitai, and says he was only a "translator." By this denial, the audience believes that this rat is a double rat, denying his own identity to escape responsibility. So, one is misled to believe that this same ex-Japaneses Kempeitai officer will act the same way when he is is confronted, alone, in private, by his victim decades after the end of the war. The surprise is, he doesn't.During the war, this Japanese Kempeitai officer conducts himself toward British POWs in accord with the Japanese code of Bushido. When confronted, alone, in private, after the war - following decades of his own reflection - by his wartime victim, this Japanese Kempeitai officer obediently submits, without protest, to his victims demands, thereby judging in retrospect his own wartime actions by that same code of Bushido.Forgiveness and penitence appear to be such exceedingly rare events in life, which makes the film's message so vitally important - forgiveness anywhere, anytime, for anything.At the time I post my review of this film, there are only a paltry 375 "customer reviews" posted on Amazon. However, the message of this film is so exceedingly important, and so effectively expressed, that the film deserves to be viewed and appreciated by the largest possible audience.One possible problem with widespread "popular" viewing of this film, however, is that people must first view those "preparatory" 100 minutes - 100 minutes of a small portion of the Japanese "infamy" in WWII.Caveat: This film is about the same "Death Railway" depicted in THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI, although the depiction in the BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI is tame by comparison. The depiction of the "Death Railway" in RAILWAY MAN is much closer to the truth. The "Death Railway" was intended to exterminate allied POWs, which were primarily British POWs. The death toll of Allied POWs was horrific.

Adoro il film che si riferiscono a fatti veramente accaduti: Mi piace molto Colin Firth sin da Pride and Prejudice e lo seguo da allora

An excellent movie and a true story although there is some deviation from the book for dramatic effect. The story is of WW2 POW Eric Lomax, his hatred of his Japanese inquisitor, PTSD & his yearning for revenge even years later. Both Firth, as Lomax & Irvine, as the young Lomax, are superb. Unfortunately, perhaps because there were no car chases or shoot-em-ups, this movie was not a big box office draw but should be seen. It shows the horror of torture & war. Unlike Rambo though, the end result is reconciliation, not as interesting to guts & glory fans as revenge. I won't say more for fear of spoiling the story. Firth & Irvine deserve Oscar nods for this but it won't likely happen since it wasn't a big hit. In the end the message is..."War, what is it good for...absolutely nothing".