The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
Decided to start watching all of the Oscar best picture winners, in order. I hadn’t heard of some of these movies, some I love and have seen multiple times already and I actively hate others, planning to never watch them again. Fair warning, there will be spoilers in these and other reviews to help explain my point of view.
The Bridge on the River Kwai is an interesting war film in that while it doesn’t depict any battle or fight scenes, it absolutely drives home the point that war is futile and dumb, with no winners on either side. This film tells the story of English POWs in Burma forced to build a bridge to aid the war effort of their Japanese captors. British and American intelligence officers conspire to blow up the structure, but Col. Nicholson , the commander who supervised the bridge’s construction, has acquired a sense of pride in his creation and tries to foil their plans. In the end, numerous POWs and Japanese soldiers die, along with those on the first train attempting to cross the bridge as it is in fact, blown up by Nicholson, as he dies from a mortal wound. Even though they were proud of the bridge and just wanted to end their captivity as peacefully as possible, war found a way to destroy, as it always does.
Did it deserve the Oscar? I have no quarrel with this film winning; it had stiff competition including 12 Angry Men, Sayonara and Witness for the Prosecution, so this is a year where it would have been interesting to know how close the vote was since any of those films could have reasonably won.
While too fatalistic for me to ever watch again, I can appreciate the high quality of this film. 3 out of 5 stars.
