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Powerful sequences of war and prison camp captivity, with gripping performances of human good and evil, high-minded, but with insufficient trust in the audience, or in the material, or even ultimately in humanity, and consequently much too heavy a hand on the moral eye-liner, so intent on spelling out the lessons that the visceral power of the actual events is watered down and scumbled in Sunday school pieties.

The film begins very powerfully with us, the camera, in a propeller bomber on a run against Japanese military installations, and just as we start to enjoy the personable young crew hell breaks loose with anti-aircraft flak bursting around us and wasplike Zero Japanese fighters zooming circles around our slow bomber, strafing thru our plane's thin walls w their heavy machine guns, ripping into our machinery and men's bodies w/o warning.

But this exciting, frightening, gripping reality is soon undermined by the directorial decision to spell out the character of the hero through an slew of flashbacks to his early life, starting w a sermon he seemed hardly to be paying attention on the text "love your enemies", going into his loving immigrant family, and the lessons learnt from mentors as he built himself into an Olympic distance runner. All of which might be quality material if subjected to critical analysis in a different movie, an intellectual meditation, but is just empty calories on the superficial level purveyed here, and, most importantly does not at all belong in this film of war and imprisonment, where whatever transcendence and redemption there is manifests itself only through the various courage and fortitude of men to soldier on through vicious and brutal reality, or to give over to the deadly despair or vicious sadism of inner demons and frailty.

Apparently a first directorial effort, fresh ideas, good instincts for performances, but so focused on expressing herself clearly as to blind herself to what the audience is experiencing given what we bring to the film, and so she presses too hard anxiously making sure every theme and motif is spelled out over and over again, until the audience is being drilled in a lesson rather than given the free, open, aesthetic experience needed to evoke pity and terror, profound emotion and illumination.

"Unbroken" is worth seeing for its strong presentation of the ignored dimensions of our humanity in war, brutal captivity, cruelty, and extraordinary strength But it could have been (and might still be?) made into a great film with the necessary editing, something along the lines of what Pound did for Eliot, ripping out all the Sunday-school blather and letting the facts speak for themselves.

Hopefully, Ms Jolie will take a tip from Picasso who defined his artistic process as a sum of destructions, removing from the canvas everything that could be removed, until what was left was the painting.

Bombastic rot with very little living intelligence or sensibility, a tale seemingly razzled up by a pursy cyborg sociopath to lure an audience of coarse appetites and dim minds.

The only redeeming feature in this long, long, turgid slog is the witty cameo pop-ups of Tilda Swinton, tossing a few bits of garlic and sapphire into the muck, like Baudelaire's sun glistening into the carrion putrefying along the roadside.

But even Ms Swinton was painful to watch shilling from the stage of MoMA this evening, trying to pretend that this bloated carrion has any real value. Answering a question about its sources of "inspiration"(sic!), Ms Swinton tolled "bombast" at least 3 times to derogate the kind of world leaders (Qaddafi, et al) that the film reflects, all the while blissfully ignoring that brutal bombast is exactly what comprises this film from snout to tail--including both the spasms of grotesque maiming and murdering wreaked on the characters, and the even worse mental torment wreaked on the minds of the audience (at least on the small sentient quotient, neurons dying as they watched).

And for Ms S to laud this film as a deconstruction of social stratification, as if she had never seen films like Regles du Jeu, had eyes rolling out of sight. No doubt actresses get used to selling themselves inside and out. But can anyone question that Renoir, 70 years less informed, tackled class conflict w incomparably finer grace, intelligence, wit, and emotional power than this pompous turd?

Tossed among the scenes of ugliness and mayhem, battles that unfold w/o rhyme or reason, are heavy musings about life and culpability by characters who are empty stereotypes , often PC, less interesting humanly than the scenery. It's always good to see the great John Hurt, but he is useless here; and Ed Harris is wrong for his part.

Snowpiercer is a film worth avoiding. Even the fight scenes are pathetic, nothing but clichés badly handled, chaotic, arbitrary, unbelievable, distinguished only by some corny sadistic sights and sounds, all of which is especially revolting enveloped in the director's smarmy PC casting and storyline, which reeks of Bill Cosby. The film's only value is for a scathing anthropology of our culture demonstrating in its popularity the buzz of battalions of blow- flies drawn to carrion.