Defiance

Now before I walked in to see this movie today, I had some really high expectations for this because the trailer for it looked amazing IMO, and because of how much I loved Blood Diamond, which was Edward Zwick’s last movie. I guess you can say that I was sort of disappointed when I finally walked out of theater from seeing it, that doesn’t mean that I didn’t like it though. I still really liked it, just no where near as much has I had hoped to like it. My main problem with this is that it tries to be this decade’s version of Schindler’s List way too much. I really think that they based Daniel Craig’s character off of Oskar Schindler from Schindler’s List. Even the overall story sort of reminded me of Schindler’s List, it was just no where near as amazing as Schindler’s List was. Another thing that I didn’t really like much was the accents, I don’t get why they just can’t keep their same voice for a role, I couldn’t even understand what some of the actors were trying to say some of the time. Those were the main bad things about Defiance that I feel need to be mentioned.

Aside from its story reminding me of Schindler’s List, it actually had a pretty well made story. I think that it was just too depressing for my tastes though; there were only a few minutes in the movie that I actually felt were happy. This actually had more action scenes in it than I had expected, especially the ending scene to it, which was probably my favorite part of the entire movie. The score for Defiance really was great though, I wasn’t surprised though, I mean Hans Zimmer is one of my favorite movie composer’s. The cinematography was also very well done for this, I mean I doubt it’s going to be nominated for anything this year at the academy awards or anything, but it was still very well done, it’s got some serious stiff competition this year.

Daniel Craig, despite having that incredibly bad accent, actually did some pretty good acting in this. Liev Schreiber stood out the most of the cast though; he had the best acting in this movie, and really overshadowed everyone else in the movie. I do think that he had the best acting in the movie because his character was my personal favorite character in the movie. Jamie Bell’s acting was surprisingly pretty good in this as well, I said surprisingly because the only other movie I’ve seen him in is Jumper, which wasn’t good at all. The main thing that impressed me the most though, was that the three of them really felt like brothers to me, they just had some great chemistry.

I still really liked this though; I didn’t quite love it though, like I had originally hoped. I would still recommend seeing it before it leaves theaters though; just expect a pretty depressing movie when you do see it. I was glad that it was the length that it was though, because I felt it if it were longer than that, it would’ve been overly long. The main reason that my rating is what it is though is because it just tried to be Schindler’s List way too hard to me; I wish it could’ve been more original. I do say that if you do go see this, don’t expect something as great as Blood Diamond was though, because you’ll probably be disappointed.

8/10