The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

Allow me to preface this with the fact that I knew how this movie was going to end before I started watching it, and I meant to watch this movie because I felt like I wanted to cry, I just didn't think it would be nearly as sad as it actually was. The main character is the son of some level of Nazi commander and they move to a new house with a concentration camp basically in their back yard. It's not like, right there in their backyard but they can smell the people burning and they can see the smokestacks and the smoke that comes from when they burned the Jews. So this  little boy naturally wants to go exploring and finds this concentration camp but of course he doesn't know what the hell it is. He finds this little boy sitting by the fence and he's wearing the uniform Jews had to wear in concentration camps and that's where the name The Boy in the Striped Pajamas comes from. This movie doesn't end well at all and I suggest if you have any love for children don't watch it. Don't even try it because you will want to die at the end of this movie.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is an interesting movie because the movie is basically fully dependent on its ability to tell a story. There aren't any other interesting elements within the movie to pay attention to besides the plot. It doesn't make the movie bad that there aren't these other elements to supplement the dialogue and the reliance of scene progression, it just makes the audience pay a lot of attention to the plot. In some movies, this can make it seem boring when there's nothing else to pay attention to besides the plot, especially when the plot is unremarkable. However, the interesting thing with this movie is that audiences constantly feel uneasy throughout the movie. It's a way to make the ending predictable in a way that makes the audience think, Oh, I knew something bad was going to happen! Mostly because the whole movie seems weird, and off and you can just feel it in your bones that things are going to go to shit very quickly by the end.

A movie that holds several different elements within it making it interesting is a great film, because that means you can watch it over and over again and pay attention to different elements within the film and get something new out of it each time. In last weeks Nightcrawler, there are many specific elements that make up the movie. You can pay attention to the main characters mannerisms and learn about his character through that. You can pay attention to the lighting throughout the whole movie and learn how that effects the tone of the movie. You can pay attention to the variety of shots and learn how the director wants you to perceive each character in each scene through the shots; you can also predict a lot of the progression of the film if you pay attention to the shot composition. In The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, there isn't all of that. All the audience can make of it is what dialogue the scene gives us and what the scene very directly shows us. It's all very straight forward. The feeling of unease comes from the fact that the child of a concentration camp officer has become friends with a Jew child within the concentration camp. Its the combination of character situations and relationships that makes you think This cannot turn out well. By the end that pent up nervous energy that makes everyone think What's going to go wrong? is realized. The reason this technique works with this movie and makes other movies boring is that we know the story of World War II. We know what it was about, so the movie doesn't have to bog us down with backstory, we just hear someone else's experience in the situation that we've all heard about before, and it's definitely a new experience. It's a story that we haven't heard before which makes the lack of extraneous elements tolerable.

On a personal note, I am not the biggest fan of this movie. I think the final falling action is sort of forced and the situation is unrealistic. That being said, I understand the message and the irony of the film. I get what it's trying to convey. I don't agree that outcome is feasible in any way, but I get it. This movie was not the best it could've been. Better care could have been taken to make it a truly amazing film, but the film was very much an adaptation of a book. All plot and no creative substance. If you want to cry, watch it, but don't watch it expecting to dissect some existential meaning.