The Bridge on the River Kwai – Captain Ahab must get his bridge

There are many Second World War films that will definitely stand the tests of time and be looked at as – almost – ‘historical’ representations of the events that transpired.  I’m not entirely sure that ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai’ will be one of those, as it’s far too ‘niche’ to maintain its popularity, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a bad film.  For a start, if you’re looking for huge ‘Saving Private Ryan’ style battles involving the heroic Allies blasting their way through legions of German troops, you’ll be very disappointed here.  With the exception of a couple of brief shoot-outs and the odd knife to the back, there’s little in the way of action here.

It’s about an unfortunate bunch of British (mainly) prisoners of war who are incarcerated in a Japanese POW camp.  There, they’re forced to help build a bridge (over the river Kwai, believe it or not!) in order to aid the Japanese war effort.  You may think that a WWII film based around a POW camp would mean that our plucky Brits would spend their time and efforts devising new and ingenious ways to tunnel their way out of there.  Not here.  The camp doesn’t even have any fences due to it being on an island, therefore there’s nowhere really to escape if they tried. 

Instead, the story predominantly focuses on two character – one is the Japanese warden who runs the facility and the other is the British officer ‘in charge’ of the captive prisoners (there’s also a sub-plot regarding how the rest of the Allied war effort perceives the camp and what they’re doing about it, but that’s secondary to the one-on-one between the two leads in my opinion).

Now, I wouldn’t go as far as saying you’d be able to ‘identify’ with the Japanese guard, but you will definitely get to know him and his motivations and, dare I say it, his character even develops as the film progresses.  However, the most interesting character is his British opposite, played by none other than (the original) Obi-wan Kenobi himself, Sir Alec Guinness.  He’s a man in charge of both keeping his soldiers’ morale up, but also the ‘good name’ of the British army/Empire.  He’ll go to almost any lengths to ensure that neither are brought down in reputation in any way.  And, his choices lead to some interesting outcomes which I won’t go into in great details here.

So, if you’re looking for an outright war film, you won’t really find it here.  Instead, you’ll get (quite a long) character study about stubborn madness, maybe even a little ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ and – what I perceived as – a variation on the ‘Captain Ahab and his whale’ type story.  Alternatively, if you’re just looking to see what old Ben Kenobi looked like without a lightsabre, you’ll find that here, too.

7/10 if I woke up on Groundhog Day and had to watch this again, I could live with that