Schindler's List (1993)

Schindler's List (1993)

Starring; Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes, and Ben Kingsly.

Plot: Oskar Schindler is a wealthy member of the Nazi Party in 1939 who wants to create a factory in Poland, using Jews as a workforce.  However, after a violent liquidation of a ghetto that contains his Jews, Schindler begins to realize how horrible it is being a Jew at this time.  After the Jews are moved to a concentration camp, Schindler begins focusing his efforts on saving Jews by letting them work in his factory.  He ends up creating a list of around eleven hundred Jews to work in his factory.  With his partner Itzhak Stern, he will try to save as many Jews until the war ends. 

Good: This is probably Spielberg's best cast in any of his films.  Liam Neeson does a stellar performance as Oskar Schindler.  He really sells the transformation from a womanizing business man to a humanitarian who cares deeply for the Jews that he ends up saving and wishes that he did more. His breakdown during the final scene is one of the most heartbreaking scenes in cinema. Ben Kingsly also does a great and subtle performance as Schindler's business partner and eventual friend.  They have a lot of good chemistry, and their evolution from partners to friends is very fluid and natural.  The rest of the cast is also amazing as well, including the minor Jew characters.  They really do a great job at portraying the pain of an ordeal such as this.  It can be very heartbreaking at some points.  John Williams's music is fantastic as always, but in a different way this time around.  In this case, the music is much more subtle and heartbreaking, with much of it being a violin solo.  It fits the tone of the movie perfectly, and it's one of his best pieces.  This film has a very unique look to it.  The majority of it is in black and white, but there are key moments where color is used.  This gives it a timeless feel, where at some points it feels like the movie is older than it actually is.  The colored portions of the movie are well realized and give more depth to a film that was already pretty deep.  The rest of the production values are great, especially the look of the camps and ghettos, which feel like characters themselves.  Surprisingly, there are a few moments of good humor in this film that add a bit of levity to this otherwise very serious film.  They don't feel intrusive, and Liam Neeson really helps make them work.

Bad: This film has a length of epic proportions at 195 minutes long, and can be a very exhausting experience for some.  I would recommend that you watch it in either two or three parts, unless you're used to powering through long movies.  It's also kind of confusing as to what Oskar Schindler's plan is in the beginning, but it does become clearer as the film goes on.  This film also has some very disturbing imagery due to its subject matter, so if you're feint at heart, this is not the film for you.

Trivia:

• Spielberg was initially hesitant about making this movie, thinking he was not mature enough to pull it off.
• He was not paid for this film, since he thought his salary would be blood money.
• Although they had permission to film within Auschwitz, they chose to build a mirror image of the camp on the other side of the gate out of respect for the victims.
• Spielberg decided to make Jurassic Park before Schindler's List because he thought he would be to drained to make the former after doing the latter.

Final Verdict: There's a reason this film won seven Academy Awards (including Best Picture) in 1994.  It's a masterpiece of cinema, and one of the greatest films ever made.  I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to know about how terrible this time period actually was, or if they just want to see a magnificent film.

Next time, we'll travel to Isla Sorna, the secret Jurassic Park never wanted people to know about in The Lost World: Jurassic Park.

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