ronnietg I see films from the perspective of a screenwriter and writing teacher. This is a brilliant script for many reasons, not the least of which was the epic story of war inherent in the designing principle. More specifically, this was the epic story of war from the perspective of the Hero, a Jewish 14- year-old teenager caught up in WWII, a Jew living in Germany. The Hero's story of survival in a world gone mad with the backdrop of the Holocaust is but one of the themes running through this story line. We also get to see the horrors of the war through the eyes of the Germans, the Nazis, the Hitler youth, the Russians, the Poles, the German Jews, the Polish Jews, German army foot soldiers, German society through the eyes of the mother whose daughter gets pregnant to donate the baby to the Fuhrer and make their family roots more Aryan...To pull off the Character Web so brilliantly, the script goes beneath the "skin" of all the players. Each character has a weakness/need and moral choices to make that deal with the central problem of WWII and ideologies that they had to "buy into" in order to survive. The use of subtext in the dialogue, whereby the character never really says what he means leads to an avoidance of conflict, but then an implosion of conflict as the plot moves forward.The Story World was one of the most authentic ever put on the screen: Land, tools, technology, man-made buildings, structures either showing extreme poverty, or suffering, or extreme power, as with the Third Reich symbols and the institutionalization of the human psyche; the dumbing down while ostensibly seeming to educate - The Lodz ghetto, with the dying Jewish populace amidst a Nazi bureaucracy; train protocol; trolly protocol; army protocol, etc., all displayed with an accuracy down to the tableware and the machinery; the clothing; the murders in plain sight.All of the structural beats were spot on: The Inciting Incident; the 12 sequences; the mid-point, all leading to the Climax/Battle scene in Sequence 11, right on the mark. In case you missed it, the opening scene is a "Brit Mila," the Jewish ritual circumcision that every male child is to have, according to the Torah and Avraham's covenant with the Jewish people. The Hero has to then hide his Jewishness/circumcised dead give-away self throughout the story. The last scene goes straight back to the first scene and deals with the theme of the covenant of circumcision leading to freedom and redemption. I'm avoiding "spoilers" for anyone who has not seen this film, but the story line self-revelation moment, both to the Hero and the audience is epic and powerful. For those who missed the "authenticity" of detail of this story, as if to say that the story line has to be a documentary of the Holocaust - This is the dilemma of writing a script that is 120 pages/minutes long as opposed to telling the story in novel format of 350 - 400 pages. What is crucial in screen writing is Narrative Drive done visually, with no dialogue in scene writing. And there are strict structural sequencing rules that have to be adhered to. This film captures all of the necessary elements to great film making, both structurally and thematically.

John Johnson The film starts off with two boys underwater. Solomon is about to turn 13 years old and celebrate his bar mitzvah, but Kristallnacht happens. His sister is killed while his family's home and store is vandalized. The rest of the family decides to flee to the father's native Poland. Here they are safe until war breaks out. Solomon and his brother are sent east by their father to flee. Here they are separated, but Solomon ends up in a Russian orphanage. Things go relatively well for Solomon who receives education in the orphanage and joins the Komsomol. When Hitler breaks his pact and invades the USSR, Solomon flees once again, this time with the rest of the orphanage. As he and the orphanage escape he is separated and captured by the Germans. Here he uses his knowledge of Russian, Polish and German to impersonate a Volksdeutscher. Through a stroke of a luck and the protection of another German soldier, he's able to remain safe and learn how to be a soldier in the German army. In a a battle his comrades are killed and, while deserting. it is assumed he is revealing a hidden Russian position. This leads him a captain to adopt him and send him west where he will enroll in an elite Hitler Youth School. Here he mostly deals with being a normal teenager and hiding his identity and circumcision. When he is about to be discovered, the Russians destroy the office where he is to verify his German purity. When the Russians finally advance, he deserts and, with the help of his surviving brother Isaak, is able to give up his hoax and rejoin his Jewish brethren. The film does a good job of showing dreams to help get into the psyche of Solomon, while the whole films feels like a real Greek drama like the Odyssey. Solomon is always off to some new place coming through mainly by luck. I especially like the reference that Hitler was himself a Jew in hiding. This helps bring the analogy that it may be better to die for one's belief, than live and hide them. Certainly it is a debate better conduced by Holocaust survivors than myself, but respecting the fact that the stories of Jews, Poles, Russians and even Germans were all different. It even posits, as Solomon's linguistic skills in battle, that perhaps a Jew is more German than some of the Volksdeutsch who were merely German by blood and not the merit that helped to actually save lives.I was completely mesmerized by all the characters. Each one enabled me to really feel and I go into it. I'd like to move away from WW2 in German cinema, but films of this caliber are hard to ignore.

denis888 Agnieszka Holland can make far better movies - her later one, In Darkness, is a great example of very fine and precise filmmaking, but here she did several mistakes which belittled and virtually midget-ed a very exciting story and a very thrilling plot. To begin with, the color scheme is very poor and makes you feel a bit wondered - er, why. Then, it is obvious that the film was made in the cheap and all those laughable plane models, highly unrealistic bombing scenes and rather sketchy big crowd frames show the mere lack of money, and that all is too obvious and really turns the attention away from following the plot. There are many clichés and very trite moments that we are sock and tired of, such as the very wooden portrayal of Soviet officers or Nazi officials - nay, Agnes, they were far more cunning and sly, not those caricature dimwits as in the film. Some scenes are just hilarious and totally unnecessary and only make you feel a bit fooled - er, what for. Unnecessary much attention to certain aspects also makes a general feeling a bit skewed and not serious. What is also not good, there are very highly improbable moments here and now - like those of Stalin's son, or barn on fire, or Polizei building bombing, or brotherly meeting - they are all very, very unnatural and utterly strange. Much can be said about rather sloppy performance of quite many actors, but not now. This is a very weak film and none close to Holland's better works

Michael Neumann The incredible story of Solomon Perel, an Eastern European Jewish teen who escaped the Holocaust by posing as a Nazi, might be difficult to swallow if it wasn't entirely true. Separated from his family and captured by German troops, Solomon escaped execution by claiming to be a 'pure bred' German orphan, apparently with enough conviction to be welcomed warmly into the ranks of his captors. The film explains the success of his desperate charade by presenting him as a passive victim of chance and circumstance. In constant jeopardy of being discovered, he is inevitably saved by one miracle of fate after another: in the Wermacht, in a Hitler Youth School, and finally as a prisoner of the Russians, awaiting the firing squad. The fact that the Germans embraced him as a model Aryan only reinforces the total blindness of their 'Master Race' conceit. With a rich sense of irony and Old World ambiguity (helping to explain the double title) veteran writer director Agnieszka Holland shows the German people to be simultaneously capable of uncomplicated affection and irrational hatred.