To End All Wars

I chose to watch one of my favorite prisoner of war movies rather than watch Jerry Rice dance to the stars. This movie, based on a true story, is advertised as a continuation of Bridge on the River Kwai. I think it's better. Though Bridge on the River Kwai was good, the most memorable thing about it I remember is the tune whistled by the prisoners. In "To End All Wars" Kiefer Sutherland, along with a number of British actors, brings to life the suffering and survival of Allied soldiers in a Japanese prisoner of war camp during WWII. There are scenes that leave a lasting impression.

Any movie that opens up with men digging their own graves has to be good. Don't worry, that bit of information won't ruin it for you. It just sets you up for what follows, trust me.

In one scene, made so believable by the worn out look of the prisoners and the melancholy musical score, a prisoner (pictured below right) who before the war was a literary professor at Oxford, begins reciting these famous lines from Shakespeare's Hamlet:

To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin?

In this even more famous soliloquy, Hamlet, with the burden of avenging his father's death, thinks that perhaps it is better commit suicide, except that there is no knowledge of what comes next. Thus, although death ought to be embraced, it should not be deliberately pursued.(from Hamlet's TO BE OR NOT TO BE)