On H List of Movie Reviews
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Holocaust (1978)
Rate:
7
Viewed:
7/25
7/25:
Holocaust was probably at least '9' back in the day, having been watched by 120 million viewers on
television from April 16 to 20, 1978, but after experiencing
Triumph of the Spirit and
Schindler's List, it's easy to detect the enormous differences.
To begin with the emotional impact, there's hardly much. Whatever happened, I didn't feel anything. At best,
I witnessed a soap opera show with Michael Moriarty going, "Oh, well. By the way, Heil Hitler." On the other
hand, Schindler's List was relentless in showing the horrors of the
Holocaust in every way possible, and nothing was held back because that's how it happened for real. Therefore,
I was 100% convinced.
The filmmakers of Holocaust didn't do a good job of juggling the characters. Although developed very well,
almost all disappeared for a long while. Never feeling like an epic, it went slow in the timeline until 1943
with forty-five minutes left overall and then rushed through the last two years. One mistake is showing a
burning synagogue at the beginning of Part One; talk about ruining the element of surprise when it became an
event later on.
No matter how much the filmmakers desperately wanted the Jewish to look heroic in the face of tragedy,
nearly all submitted to their fate without fighting back. The Warsaw Ghetto and the Sobibor Uprisings
represented an extremely small sample of resistance. As a result, the filmmakers tried to make an action movie
out of the Holocaust which was inappropriate on the whole.
How about these principal leads with full hair on their heads and lots of body fat while in concentration and
death camps? Obviously, they didn't believe in the material strongly enough to make the sacrifice. Remember
the ending when Meryl Streep hugged Joseph Bottoms and said it's been seven years since they last saw each
other? That felt like they just got back from a vacation after one week. As for James Woods' character who
was caught because of the drawings, he would've died within a few days.
If there's a positive, Holocaust is a well-acted miniseries, being the first work to show the tragedy
in its entirety, hence popularizing the term for the first time ever, that touches a lot of aspects to raise
awareness. Despite having seen plenty of similar films, I did learn a small amount of stuff. However, it
received too many award nominations for acting when they should've gone to only two thespians, and that's
Michael Moriarty and David Warner. They were dead-on in terms of cold-blooded killers with no feelings while
everybody else was nothing special, having done his or her part and went home at the end of the day.
All in all, it's okay to watch Holocaust, but
Triumph of the Spirit, and
Schindler's List are far better.