Trailer Trashin’: Colin Firth is out for Revenge in The Railway Man
The September holding pattern continues as nothing much is happening in movie-land at the moment. But that will change next week, when Rush, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2, Don Jon, and Metallica: Through the Never all open. In the meantime, this week’s new installment of Trailer Trashin’ examines our first look at the upcoming war drama The Railway Man.
Premise: During World War II, Eric Lomax (Colin Firth) was a British officer captured by the Japanese in Singapore and sent to a POW camp, where he was tortured and forced to work on the construction of the Thailand-Burma Railway. Years later, and still suffering from the psychological trauma of his wartime experiences, Lomax is persuaded by his wife Patti (Nicole Kidman) to find and confront one of his former captors. Accompanied by his close friend Finlay (Stellan Skarsgård), Lomax returns to the scene of his torture and manages to track down former Japanese officer Takashi Nagase (Hiroyuki Sanada), one of the men who tormented him, in an attempt to let go of a lifetime of bitterness and hate.
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My take: As I said in my column about The Monuments Men, we’ve probably had enough World War II movies to last us until the end of time. But they keep getting made, because apparently there are still stories from that period of history that are yet to be told. One such story is the infamous Thailand-Burma Railway, which was built by the Imperial Japanese to support their forces in the Burma campaign, and constructed using the forced labor of over 200,000 Asian laborers and Allied prisoners-of-war. Around 90,000 Asian laborers and 12,000 POWs died as a direct result of the project, which led to the line also being known as the “Death Railway.” Now, this story is being brought to movie screens in The Railway Man, based on the autobiographical book by Eric Lomax, a British Army officer who survived this horrifying ordeal. The first trailer for The Railway Man has arrived, and while it looks very sad and downbeat, it also looks like it could be something great.
Colin Firth in “The Railway Man.”
For me, the biggest thing that The Railway Man has going for it is its cast. Ever since I first saw him as Mr. Darcy in the 1995 TV miniseries of Pride and Prejudice, Colin Firth has been an actor whose work I follow and admire, and after his Oscar-winning performance in The King’s Speech (2010), I look forward to seeing him play some darker material here as Eric Lomax. Nicole Kidman is also on hand as Patti Lomax, Eric’s wife, and it looks like her role here will make a striking contrast to her icy, emotionally unstable turn in Stoker earlier this year. The always-reliable Stellan Skarsgård plays Eric’s friend Finlay, and it’s a nice change of pace to see him playing what seems like a good character. Hiroyuki Sanada, who already showed up in The Wolverine this summer and will appear in 47 Ronin this Christmas, plays Eric’s former captor Takashi Nagase, and I look forward to seeing what he does here.
Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman in “The Railway Man.”
Judging from the trailer, it looks like this movie is going to be emotionally devastating to watch. The ordeal which the Allied POWs and Asian laborers suffered through during the building of the Thailand-Burma Railway is something the vast majority of us can’t even imagine, and it doesn’t look like director Jonathan Teplitzky and his screenwriters are going to pull any punches in their depiction of what happened. And with Colin Firth being such an amazing actor, I just know he’ll be able to make us feel every tortured moment that Lomax goes through. But the thing is, while I’m sure the movie will be very good, if not great, I feel like seeing it in a theater might be too intense for me, though that’s more to do with me being a wimp than anything else.
Ultimately, there’s not too much to say about this trailer, other than it looks really good. We’ve got a great cast and a real-life story with great dramatic potential. If we are going to keep getting movies about World War II, I’d prefer it if a lot of them would be films of this kind, which draw attention to the events which aren’t the same ones every school kid learns about in history class. I don’t know if I could handle watching it at the theater, but I definitely want to check out The Railway Man at some point, and I really hope it gets released over here.
Release Date: January 3rd, 2014 in the UK, TBA in the US
Starring: Colin Firth, Nicole Kidman, Jeremy Irvine, Tanroh Ishida, Sam Reid, Stellan Skarsgård, Hiroyuki Sanada, Marta Dusseldorp, Masa Yamaguchi, Keiichi Enomoto, James Fraser, Jacob Daly, and Shoota Tanahashi
Director: Jonathan Teplitzky
Writers: Frank Cottrell Boyce and Andy Paterson, based on The Railway Man by Eric Lomax
P.S. Just to let everyone know, there may not be a new Trailer Trashin’ column next week. I’m reviewing two movies coming out next Friday, plus doing a really cool interview that I can’t wait to share, and I’m going to be out of town for my sister’s wedding. Once that is all finished, Trailer Trashin’ will resume its normal schedule in two weeks.
Timothy Monforton
