I am reviewing the movie The Railwayman which is an excellent film. It stars Colin Firth, Nicole Kidman & Stellan Skarsgard and is based on a true story. Colin plays an ex prisoner of war in a Japanese POW camp during World War 2 who now suffers with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and keeps getting flashbacks to when he was abused by them. Nicole plays a lady whom he meets on a train and whom he subsequently marries. She is desperate to understand what he went through and it has made him the way he is. Stellan plays a fellow soldier from the same POW camp and close friend who has found out the camp commandant is still alive and in rather a nice job showing people around the former POW camp. He is sure if he tells Colin he will definitely want retribution against the commandant. Stellan is quite disturbed himself from his experiences and ends up hanging himself. Colin goes after the commandant and the film follows his experiences through the POW camp where he was horrendously tortured for building a simple radio. They waterboarded him among other things and the commandant knew perfectly well that the allegations he built a 2 way radio are false but abuses him all the same. We see how the Japanese thought that a soldier who hadn’t committed hari kari rather than capture is the lowest of the low and treated the prisoners accordingly. Colin is a railway enthusiast who at one point says the British never linked Burma up with a railway because building a railway is very unpleasant in itself, and building a railway through the jungle like what the Japanese are trying to make them do is barbaric. I really enjoyed this film and best part is Colin comes face to face with the commandant years later. It’s amazing to think this is a true story.
