That was an excellent one.

Overrated

Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

Back in 1987, this excellent British-made film aired on American television. Fortunately, if you want to see it, you can now download it absolutely free from archive.org--and I strongly recommend you do.This film is the true story of a death camp called Sobibor and the inmates who eventually mounted the largest escape during WWII. Of the 600 prisoners, over 300 escaped and many of these folks managed to survive the war. This is awfully astounding and a nice contrast to all the depressing holocaust films, as in this case they fight back--killing many of their SS tormentors in the process of escaping.The film deserves very high marks in just about every way. The acting is superb, the script tense and rousing and the story sticks close to the facts--something not all historical films do. Well worth seeing and, not surprisingly, sad and tragic at times, so have some Kleenex handy and don't let young kids watch this alone.

Without doubt the most emotionally moving film I have ever seen.The atmosphere created cuts through the fact that it is a movie and puts any normal person actually there.Absolutely the most accurate portrayal of the lowest point of human behaviour ever.It still beggars belief that a so-called civilised nation could embark on the systematic annihilation of people purely based on their religion.God forbid this should ever happen againI cried several times and I am not an emotional man.

Much film has been done about the holocaust from virtually all angles, and this film fits right in amongst them. Now, I wouldn't say it is the best, not by a long-shot, but it has suspense and more-over and more importantly, a reality background which the film-makers kept close to, backed with closing pictures of the camp today and what happened with some of the survivors. That adds to the value of this film.However, the film is not as good as it could have been unfortunately. I found the acting being less than average at a few points but especially Rutger Hauer do a good job throughout the film. Then we have my pet peeve that everybody speaks English which removes some of the authenticity but its OK. The SFX was less passable, but again, OK. I found a couple of factual errors as well, but nothing that distracted the overall impression.Overall though, I would recommend this to watch as a complement to The Grey Zone. They both show uprisings in camps, but The Grey Zone do it much grittier. Simply put, this is a good movie.

At the end of this film, I cried. This is a very moving and powerfully told story, a film that never falters with a boring scene either during it's up-tempo sequences (action scenes/encounters between prisoners and captors) or its down-tempo sequences (the emotional and philosophical grounding of the story with prisoner interaction). It'll leave you cheering when the prisoners take their opportunity to action their revenge, yet at that same time leave you only too aware that in the big picture they're ultimately jousting with futility (most escapees were eventually recaptured & killed).In my book, the definitive Holocaust film, and as such should not go unseen by anyone. This film speaks as much to the human condition as it does to the details of the Nazi horrors.