Unbroken

This image shows my favorite part in the whole movie

Before I say anything else, let’s make an agreement, shall we?

Let’s pretend that I have been writing on my blog all along. I will not mention how I haven’t written a single word here for the past ten months and you will pretend that I have never stopped writing :)

No, I can’t do that lol

I’ve missed writing here so much!! And I have missed hearing from you so much that I’m nervous I might end up messing up this review and writing it all wrong.

But I’m going to try ok?

As some of you might have seen on my Facebook page, last week I went to the movies – to that nice movie theatre where the seats recline and the popcorn is free (yay!) – and I watched a movie that wasn’t talked about much, but that is so worth watching! It’s a movie called Unbroken.

It’s about this young man, Louis Zamperini, who when he was a child, never believed he could amount to anything, until his older brother encouraged him to join the track team in his school. He gave it a go and found out that he was extremely good at it. He started winning all the competitions and although he was still very young, he got to compete in the Olympics.

A few years later, he was sent to fight in the war in Japan. As he was leaving in the train, his brother told him something – now pay attention because it’s here you realize this is going to be a good movie. He tells him:

“A moment of pain is worth a lifetime of glory.”

And then his train leaves to go to war.

In one of his missions in Japan, his airplane crashes into the sea - killing 8 of his friends. Only he and 2 others survived. One of them, as soon as he entered the little boat that would be their house for the next 47 days, started saying, “We are going to die! We are all going to die!!” Guess what happened to him?

Louis and his friend survived 47 days at sea, eating raw fish and drinking rain water, but one day there was a very big storm and seeing he was probably going to die, he makes a prayer asking God to get him out of there and that if He did, he would serve Him forever and do whatever He wanted. So by now you know this movie is going to be REALLY good.

The storm passed and still they were stranded, no sign of rescue from anywhere. When all hope seemed lost, a ship comes and rescues them. But guess what? It’s the Japanese, the enemies they were fighting in the war!

He and his friend are taken to a prison camp and what happens after that is something beyond what I can describe here.  You have to watch it. All I can say is that I will never forget the messages given in this movie.

If I were to summarize all the messages in the movie in one word, it would be: Endurance.

The situations Louis went through and his reaction to them are just… You can see there was a Higher Power with him. You can tell God was with him in every one of them, otherwise he wouldn’t, couldn’t have survived.

This movie teaches us the importance of not letting other people’s actions change us; or the hard knocks life gives us, break us. It shows the power of not paying with the same coin but to hold fast to what you know is right and to remain strong in that faith. Yes, this movie is about faith and about believing until the very end.

You see, if this was just a regular movie, written by a talented writer, it would have already been good, but the great thing about it is, it’s a true story. A story about endurance, resilience, forgiveness, faith. It’s about an answered prayer made in a moment of desperation. It’s about how God never fails those who trust and believe in Him, even if for a long time it seems like He has.

I can’t say anymore, except that I love this movie and if you had no plans to watch Unbroken, you really, really should.

I will however leave you with this amazing quote from the movie, just to give you a little taste. When Zamperini said he wanted to kill his enemies, that he didn’t care if he died in the process; he just wanted to kill them, a fellow war prisoner said to him:

“This is not how we beat them. We beat them by making it to the end of the war alive. That’s our revenge.”

I mean… just awesome!