The Railway Man

Yes!  Until snowpiercer, I hear this is pretty good.   I plan to wait until it is on DVD/streaming and watch both it and Bridge of the River Kwai again.  

The "Bridge on the River Kwai" revisited and expanded?

Thanks for the heads up on this new film.

I saw this sfilm about 3 weeks ago. It is not a train movie, and I knew it. It is about an English POW who was very interested in railroads, was forced to work on building a railroad with thousands of other POW's for the Japanese, through India.

The story is all about his struggle, his treatment by the Japanese, and subsequent going back to meet one of his guards back in the 1980's.

It is a moving story and very well done. I would HIGHLY RECOMMEND this to others that are interested in WW11 history. Wonderful acting, and wait for the ending to see actual photos of the POW's and their Japanese captures.

RAY

I saw the film in February.  It stars Nicole Kidman as the love interest.  The film was very dark and disturbing to me.   I suppose that is what you should expect of a story about a brutal POW camp and men struggling with PTSD for years afterwards.

I visited the Kwai River Bridge and the site of the POW camps during a trip to Thailand.  I also rode the railway to and along the Burma border.  Burma was in the middle of a civil war at that time and you couldn't enter it on the train.

The railroad was built to supply the Japanese army that was fighting the British in Burma.  This was a brutal campaign that most people don't know much about.  It is lost to history except for the historians.  

What isn't generally known is that there were only a handful of British and other POWs working on the railroad.  I think that there were about 10,000 POWs.  

The vast majority of the people working on the railroad were Thais that the Japanese forced into slavery.  The Thais were treated much worse than the POWs.  

Over 1 million Thais died because of Japanese brutality.  Every railroad tie on the line represents a death of a man, woman, and even children forced into slavery and brutalized by the Japanese army.  It was the rape of Nanking and China all over again.   I found this to be a very sobering thought as I stood on the bridge and gazed at each railroad tie stretching into the distance.  

My father fought through the South Pacific with the Navy in WWII,  Along with the other American people of his generation, he helped to save the future.  I always put out my flags on the 4th and remember him, the others in his generation, and the millions of other people around the world who sacrificed to defeat Nazi Germany and Military Japan.

Joe

My Dad flew bombers in the War.  The 4th is coming up, and we'll have flags out in celebration of out country's birthday and memory of how hard some of us fought.

Though the message may be very disturbing, it deserves attention as to what the consequences are when going to war with a nation who at the time did not share our values of humane treatment of it's prisoners.

Looks like an interesting film, I will be checking it out and try and get a copy of the book to read. As stated above the CBI (China, Burma, India) was the third war theater for the US and is the one that very little has been written about. If you are interested, one of the best books written on the first 6 months of the Pacific war is BUT NOT IN SHAME by John Toland.

Passenger Train Collector: To this day, Japan has yet to acknowledge it's tortures, rapes, biowar testing, etc., of any people of "enemy" or "colony" nations.

Thanks for the replies everyone. I shall be sure to see this film when it opens here in a couple of weeks time.

Although this theatre of the war is mostly little known in the USA, it was a very important theatre for British, Australian and other Empire armed forces. My grandfather served in Singapore and Burma, before North Africa and then up through Italy until finally reaching Germany. He rarely spoke about his war, but would sometimes mention that he started the war with a nice cruise on a ship, and then spent the next 5 years walking home. Although he fought Italians and Germans as well as the Japanese, he retained a particular dislike for the Japanese until the day he died.

It and River Kwai really are bookends of sorts.  The new movies is all about the reconciliation of this POW with one of the former guards at the camp, and not really a war movie as much as a peace movie in some very deep sense. 

Very good movie. Colin Firth and Nicole Kidmam portray these ordinary people very well.

The movie  portrays the Japanese well also. The Japanese thought prisoners who surrendered were less than human, they could not understand why they would not fight to the end, and treated them very badly.

My uncle remains in the South Pacific even today,some 70 years later, along with the rest of his flight crew, along with way too many American soilders.

Fred