As for the bridge’s location and the stream, don’t forget the limitations of movie-making for the time. There also might have been a fantastic reason to put the bridge where it was that just wasn’t explained; either way, it misses the point of what the bridge represents to Saito, Nicholson, the American commando, the British soldiers, the Japanese and the British. One can also argue that most Japanese POW camp commanders would have killed Nicholson, or that most generals who did what Nicholson did would have been killed by their men. The point the movie wants to make is that this particular POW camp commander and this particular army chose not to.
The fact that you can even have a discussion about what the bridge represents to different people and the relationship between the two commanders is itself the evidence of why this is a truly great movie.
Yes, I understand that older movies had limitations. (I think I made that quite clear in the same post that you’re referring to, #29, in the second to last paragraph).
But knowing that a movie is old doesn’t necessarily make the limitations more acceptable for a modern viewer.
There were a lot of things in the movie, visually and otherwise, that felt inaccurate to me. I don’t really care about the larger point he was making, I wanted to enjoy a good movie. The visual and other problems interfered with my enjoyment of the movie.
In a way, these things created an uncanny valley for me. I can watch low-budget old movies and enjoy them despite visual limitations because the limitations are so obvious and generally I know about them and accept them beforehand or in the first few minutes of watching the movie. The original version of King Kong is an example of this. But watching Kwai, I knew it was regarded as an outstanding movie of its day, and so many elements of it felt modern, that the elements that were off stood out more to me. Perhaps I was using the wrong standard to judge it. But there you go - I used my own standards and considered it disappointing - average, not great.
That never seemed ambiguous to me. The look of horror on Alec’s face clearly showed his sudden realization that’d he’d strayed beyond the bounds of morale and discipline into treason, and hoped to pay for redemption with his life. He even says something like “Oh my god, what have I done…”.
I’d never thought of it as anything other than a story of particular characters… I’d never thought of that angle, but I definitely see if now that you’ve brought it up.
But at the same time, does he will himself to fall on the dynamite or does he just happen to stumble there as he is dying? Does he decide to destroy the bridge that he has invested so much of himself in or is he frozen in horror as he realizes what he has become?
The “What have I done…” line seems to imply that he wakes up and realizes what is going on and destroys the bridge, but the movie could have found a way to make his actions far more definite than they were portrayed in the film.
When I was pretty young, I read Taipan (primarily because of the old computer game) followed by Shogun, Noble House, Whirlwind, then Gaijin. I started King Rat but like I said never made it to the end, and I was wondering how well it would hold up. You know, since often the more “grown up” books we read as kids are very disappointing when revisited later in life. I remember liking Whirlwind a lot, despite some of his choices in it, if only because it was a nice break from his Chinese/Japanese bag of tricks that was getting a little stale at that point.
Both as part of the larger work, and as a separate novel, I cannot recommend King Rat highly enough. It doesn’t have the ‘here be an epic’ feel of some of the others, but definitely has a large impact, with some very well drawn characters. Really gives (I think) a feel for the desparation and the corruption that can spread through depravation. Unlike Dessie, I think the film works very well - I was lucky enough to catch it by accident before I had even read the book. It’s getting on a bit but I really didn’t think it showed - keep meaning to give it a second viewing to find out.
Sold. I’ll get it again, and add the movie to my queue. It can’t be worse than the Shogun movie-series, right?
I will never for the life of me understand why people take small historical inconsistencies in a work of fiction and turn them into full blown “I don’t like this movie” problems.
There’s a whole other movie there that you obviously didn’t watch.
Here… go read all these so you can have even more reasons to hate one of the best movies ever made.
Honestly, this is exactly the problem we have in game reviewing today. Most reviewers are so caught up in the minutiae of the game and the technical details that they miss the larger whole entirely.
What you did with your first post Phil, is what people bag on game reviewers for doing to games all the time.
Err, I didn’t say I hated the movie, but I guess if I don’t think it’s one of the best movies ever made that’s pretty much the same thing, right?
I’m not a movie reviewer. Just a guy who watches movies from time to time. On the contrary, I think it is the elite reviewer mentality that tends to gush on movies like Kwai that are too long, too slow, and perhaps too focused on driving home a message at the expense of making an entertaining movie.
As for games, I like games that are fun. Sometimes, those games are quite crude (visually), sometimes they’re quite realistic. For the most part though, I’ve been leaning towards the visually simplistic for the last few years.
The problem people have with videogame reviewers is that they can’t form an independent thought. The irony of defending canon then saying if only more game critics were like this.
You know, that all makes sense. It’s like how the release of Star Wars not six months after the Academy created a special award for Logan’s Run’s visual effects forever ruined how LR looks to people.
Damn you Rimbo, your one man reign of webcomic terror is bad enough, but I will not stand around while you bad mouth Logan’s Run. Jenny Agutter in a diaphanous dress cannot be ruined, you pencil-necked geek-mo.
King Rat the movie is worth seeing - I didn’t mean to come down harshly on it. It’s just structurally a bit stilted, from basically haphazardly trying to fit scenes from the book in, without having a more congruous narrative theme in the new medium.
Whirlwind, the book, is definitely worth reading. It’s definitely one of, if not, his best book(s).
God that chick is hot…especially in “American Werewolf in London” we get to see boobage…
anyway, as much as I enjoyed King Rat, all I kept thinking was Stalag 17…
And it’s pretty obvious Sir Alec falls on the detonator on purpose.
Even as a little kid I got that.
Movies are an art form… I think all art forms improve over time. Look at painting, pottery, jewelry from ancient times vs modern paints. The old stuff looks crude and unrefine compared to modern paints. I am not talking about abstract art, but look at top notch landscape painting vs something lanscape painted 1,000 year ago.
Same thing with books. I love history and by all account Gibbons The Decline and Fall of the Rome Emperor is a classic and one of the first modern history books. Still I couldn’t force myself to read more than a couple of hundred pages, because the craft of story telling has improved in the last 350 years.
Movies are the 2nd youngest art form (games of course are the youngest) and so the evolution of movies, is relatively rapid.
Bridge of River Kwai is a great movie for 1957. Thanks to the magic of netflix I’ve made a point of watching a lot of old Oscar winners, A Man for All Seasons, Citizen Kane, On the Waterfront, Public Enemy. Other than Gone with Wind, I can’t say I’d call any of the movies made more than 50 years ago great. Most of them have been good, and better than the typical movie made today, but often the pacing is slow, the dialogue is wooden, and plots unrealistic.
Still it is important to consider that if I told you to that Doom, Civilization, Ultima I, Silent Service, Mule, or WarCraft were great classic games, I’d be telling you the truth. However, if you actually sat down and played them today, the best you’d say about any of them was well the graphics sucked, but the game play was decent. I seriously doubt any of them would be described as very good much less great today.
Strollen, I’m a nostalgia gamer, so you picked the wrong guy for this statement.
That said, the old games that I like, crude graphics and all, I like for some odd mixture of personal nostalgia and underlying gameplay. I would expect that most young gamers who started playing within the last 5-10 years wouldn’t appreciate most of the oldies that I like.
Also, due to the difficulties of getting a lot of the old stuff to run, I don’t play the oldies that often, but I do occasionally go on a kick. I had an Intellivision hooked up for a week or two not long ago. Interestingly, my 6 year old boy didn’t complain about the graphics, IIRC, but did struggle with the controller a bit.
Anyways, I definitely understand that many ‘classics’ may have been greats at the time of their creation, and charted a path for many later creations, but don’t necessarily hold up well today, if considered strictly on their own merits.
I think for movies, most movies considered great made in the 70s and later still hold up well, but it gets sketchy when you go back further. I actually like a lot of old movies, but have a hard time persuading my wife to watch them.
