Customer Reviews

The True Story of the Bridge on the River Kwai (History Channel)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This story is historically accurate - no punches pulled. It's not a "Hollywood" fairy tale entertainment as the 1957 movie turned out to be - this is real and worth adding to your library. Not only is it a great historical epic, but it also pays tribute to the hundreds/thousands of men who died building not one, but two bridges over the River Kwai. I'd recommend this to anyone interested in history of WWII in the Pacific Theater.

After seeing this on the actual history channel I had to get a copy for myself and my WWII history buff brother in law. It tells the REAL story of the Bridge over the river Kwai which was so misrepresented by the movie that came out of Hollywood. It was no bunch of whistling soldiers---it was a death camp. A must for anyone who collects WWII movies and information.

This was a good review of the "True" story. I visited the Bridge last year and was very touched at the site and the suffering that took place at this place. This film is well presented.

This History Channel product not only rides on the fame of the great Lean movie, "The Bridge on the River Kwai," but it is also its severest critic. Roger Mudd, who introduces and concludes the narrative, is especially harsh, saying that it was William Hendrson, the Texan pilot who bombed the actual bride built by the prisoners, not William Holden. This, to me, reveals the irony of the merits of the film, which, such as it is, is so powerful that it provoked the justified responses of those surviving actual prisoners who suffered unbelievable atrocities as prisoners of war building the Bangkok-Rangoon railway for the Japanese during the early years (1942-1943) of the war in Asia. The DVD offers invaluable material, actual pictures of emaciated and sick prisoners working under the most inhuman conditions, and atrocities committed that are hardly imaginable. I would like to recommend to those that still love Lean's movie to read Pierre Boulle's novel, on which the picture was based. Boulle, himself a war prisoner in those days, describes the atrocities quite vividly. Try the novel, the movie (still useful even as fiction) and the DVD. All three works reveal horrid truths about human nature--and the nature of war--in their own particular ways.

This tells a story about the Pacific theater of WWII that needs to be told. It is an interesting history, although it suffers some from it's constant references to the fictionalized Hollywood movie. If you have not seen the Hollywood movie recently you might want to watch it first. After seeing that you will want to know the real story anyway, and this DVD will mean more to you that way.

Very well done. Totally different from the movie we are all use to seeing.
This should be watched by anyone going to visit that area of the world.

The video arrived in excellent shape and in a timely manner. I would order from them again.