Defiance

Even with a great story, strong acting, and an epic, haunting wilderness in which to shoot this movie somehow still fails, and badly. Why does Hollywood feel compelled to turn characters into heroes? Rather than providing us with a convincing and morally difficult work about an ambiguous and morally abject moment in human history, by hedging their bets against audience offense and lost sales, the producers, investors, director, and whoever else makes movies happen, took a true story too upsetting and incredible to ignore, or exploit, and in order to build a blockbuster took to re-educating the facts until "based on" crowded out most of that "true story."

Fuck that. Show me everything, including the genocidal raids on Poles, the camp rapes and mutual murders, and whatever else went on, and let me come to my own conclusions about who's a hero. And for the record, I don't care that he let a baby stay despite ordering the women not to get pregnant, or that he cared so deeply for justice that he regretted killing Nazis; these qualities do not exempt him from the Law declaring that no person, fictional or real, be saved at the movie's climax, alone and outnumbered, doomed to certain death, by his estranged brother on a tank, okay? Especially when that shit never happened. Even if it did happen, think again, because miracles don't print. But especially when it didn't.

On the positive side, though, I learned where Lithuania is.