Let's start it off with some good things: Konstantin Khabenskiy was great, like finding a pearl in a pile of horseshit. If only he directed as well as he acted. When I asked my girlfriend to name a single aspect of the movie that she considered "acceptable" apart from him she was silent for 10 seconds before saying "The lighting was alright".
Now that we got that out of the way: apart from Khabenskiy the acting was absolutely horrendous. This wasn't helped at all by the fact that everyone was dubbed over for some reason in an extremely obvious and unsynchronised manner, which evoked frequent laughter in the movie theater. Some scenes were stretched out painfully long like I've never seen before. For a movie that has such emotionally strong source material and such direct graphic and raw material it was incredibly incredibly boring. I was just bored out of my mind the entire film. People were leaving the movie theater all movie long. Even people that amazingly held on for 1 hour and 30 minutes or more realized that they wouldn't get their lost time back by suffering another minute more and left before the ending. The uninspired writing and dialogue was just insufferable and combined with the acting made it impossible to get into the movie at all. Throw in a lack of character depth, development or any proper introduction or storyline and you simply only care about the raw suffering of the holocaust you're witnessing, but not about any of the actual characters or the story they're trying to convey. This story, by the way, was spread out wafer thin in the movie despite it being intriguing in real life and it was mostly padded with long dragged out scenes of intense suffering of irrelevant characters that you do not care about with no other purpose than to show the actual suffering itself. Oh, did I mention the uninspired and again plain boring soundtrack that sounds like they took the exact same orchestra from the Band of Brothers soundtrack and asked it to play completely random notes very slowly? Surely some piano tunes and slow dragging strings must automatically mean beautiful and emotional music right? If there's anything this movie did right it was giving you the feeling as if you were being held captive and tortured yourself. Really captivating in that sense.
Now that we got that out of the way: apart from Khabenskiy the acting was absolutely horrendous. This wasn't helped at all by the fact that everyone was dubbed over for some reason in an extremely obvious and unsynchronised manner, which evoked frequent laughter in the movie theater. Some scenes were stretched out painfully long like I've never seen before. For a movie that has such emotionally strong source material and such direct graphic and raw material it was incredibly incredibly boring. I was just bored out of my mind the entire film. People were leaving the movie theater all movie long. Even people that amazingly held on for 1 hour and 30 minutes or more realized that they wouldn't get their lost time back by suffering another minute more and left before the ending. The uninspired writing and dialogue was just insufferable and combined with the acting made it impossible to get into the movie at all. Throw in a lack of character depth, development or any proper introduction or storyline and you simply only care about the raw suffering of the holocaust you're witnessing, but not about any of the actual characters or the story they're trying to convey. This story, by the way, was spread out wafer thin in the movie despite it being intriguing in real life and it was mostly padded with long dragged out scenes of intense suffering of irrelevant characters that you do not care about with no other purpose than to show the actual suffering itself. Oh, did I mention the uninspired and again plain boring soundtrack that sounds like they took the exact same orchestra from the Band of Brothers soundtrack and asked it to play completely random notes very slowly? Surely some piano tunes and slow dragging strings must automatically mean beautiful and emotional music right? If there's anything this movie did right it was giving you the feeling as if you were being held captive and tortured yourself. Really captivating in that sense.