SummarySteven Spielberg's epic drama tells the compelling true story of German businessman Oskar Schindler (Neeson) who comes to Nazi-occupied Poland looking for economic prosperity and leaves as a savior. (History in Film)
SummarySteven Spielberg's epic drama tells the compelling true story of German businessman Oskar Schindler (Neeson) who comes to Nazi-occupied Poland looking for economic prosperity and leaves as a savior. (History in Film)
The worst of times has brought out the best in Spielberg, and it is the delicate narrative balance that makes Schindler's List such a special and profoundly moving experience. [15 Dec 1993, p.E2]
If Spielberg’s account of the Holocaust is not his greatest movie, it is still the defining moment of his career, the point where his yearning to be taken seriously (The Color Purple, Empire of the Sun) finally fully merged with his filmmaking talents.
Schindlers List is arguably one of the greatest movies ever made. What I admire about this movie is that is manages to be mature, engaging, and is able to capture the horrors of the holocaust. The cinematography is possibly some of the best I have ever seen. Neeson and Fiennes have great performances. 10/10
But the film Schindler's List, directed with fury and immediacy by a profoundly surprising Steven Spielberg, presents the subject as if discovering it anew.
Director Steven Spielberg has achieved something close to the impossible--a morally serious, aesthetically stunning historical epic that is nonetheless readily accessible to a mass audience.
The movie's ending at the train station and the modern-day epilogue feel protracted and indulgent...Apart from the ending though, this is Spielberg's most articulate movie ever.
The movie is not that bad but it's far from Spielberg's best works. Ralph Fiennes here is great but this film really exaggerates things a lot. One of the negative notes is also that this film, which is supposed to tell the story of Oskar Schindler, sees its most interesting scenes just when Schindler is not involved. Slightly flawed script.
The dialog was phony. Working showers in a death camp? Doubtful. The problem with any holocaust movie is that it is has to be attempt to explain IT - why a continent full of supposed civilized human beings went temporarily insane. This film has the usual prop - the automatons walking around in German soldier garb. Which gets nowhere to explaining It. The evil is indescribable and undepictable. When the goal is exterminating a mass of people in the context of simultaneously reaching to the heights of culture and science, the only reality is that whatever the victims experienced went to the limits as to what human beings could ever conceive in the harming of others.
None has ever come close. Not this one either.
Sappy, manipulative and a ridiculously oversimplified version of the Holocaust.
Spielberg has made a name for himself in the film industry by reducing serious subjects to the lowest denominator until it's no more than any mawkish family melodrama. Why should a movie about the Holocaust be any different? Schindler's List is an aesthetic mess and exemplifies everything that's wrong about Hollywood.
First off, the movie's primary focus is to show us how Oscar Schindler, a slave owner aiming to run his factories through jew labour for monetary profit, turns into a defender of jews' rights and the protector of their lives. But the problem is Schindler's transformation is portrayed in an extremely poor way. In fact, there is no transformation. Midpoint in the film, the Schindler persona has disappeared, and we have a new character clothed in the same flesh -- a self-sacrificing philanthropist who spends his entire amassed fortune to save the Jew workers. How did we get from one to the other?
And then we have Amon Goeth. He's an evil, sadistic, Jew-hating **** - but do we get to know why he wakes up every morning, takes a swig of booze and snipes Jew prisoners for fun? No. Spielberg thinks the answer is obvious -- he's a ****, and **** don't have reasons for the things they do. The attempt to add depth to Göeth's character by dwelling on his twisted love affair with a Jewish girl is easily seen for what it is -- a cheap exposure of **** hypocrisy. The true intrigue, the true horror of the Holocaust does not lie in brutality alone, but rather in Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil". How can a man (or millions of men) arbitrarily narrow the moral sphere to exclude people seemingly no different from neighbours, friends and family?
Another problem is the accent. There are English-speaking films and then there are German-speaking films. Schindler's List, on the other hand, does not belong to either of these categories. One of the truly unforgivable aspects of the film is the ending. When Schindler took off his gold ring and blubbered "I could have saved one more", I experienced a feeling of mild revulsion. Spielberg's invariable resort to sentimentality is quintessentially Hollywood, quintessentially cheesy and quintessentially inappropriate for the subject matter of the film. Schindler's List is technically brilliant but Spielberg is a director of extremely limited vision. His moral and intellectual depth is that of a child (and the funny part is Schindler's List may be the most mature movie Spielberg has made till now).