A plodding script? Steven Zaillian’s adaptation is a model of how to get a large amount of incident and narrative into a fairly tight three act structure. And the characters played by Neeson, Kingsley and Feinnes are indelible. You’re the first person I’ve ever heard call it boring. When it came out it was hard to find anyone who disliked it. Also, I wonder if that subject matter can ever seem non-’important’ in a cinematic treatment? Did you like Sophie’s Choice?
I think part of it’s problem is the subject matter, we’ve developed as a culture in this country where you’re almost not allowed to say anything about the Holocaust stinks. But the reality is not many of the movies that relate to the Holocaust are actually very good. There’s a lot of “oh the horror” and not actually much in the way of plot. And yeah I think the script plods, a lot of incident and narrative but it’s most repetitive, oh look more horrors, oh gosh another group, terrible things happen, wash rinse repeat. I just want to grab the people that make those movies with those scenes and say “look anybody watching your movie already knows the Holocaust was horrible and evil and wrong, can we move the hell on and get to the story part, we don’t need to be convinced genocide is wrong, we figured that out already”.
I’ve never seen Sophie’s Choice, not for the Holocaust part but for the forbidden love part, anything that revolves heavily on who a character is going to sleep with I don’t want to have anything to do with. Mostly because I don’t like people that think that way. Anybody I’ve know over the age of 18 that got themselves into the “woh woh should I or shouldn’t I” situation is an idiot, I don’t want to know them as people and I way don’t want to watch movies about them.