Atrocities watered down?

i was just reading something about betty jeffreys who was an australian nurse on 'paradise road' (i think they must have changed all the names for the movie). it was her journal, 'white coolies', that alot of the movie was based on. she said that she was dissapointed because the movie strayed too much from actual events but she also said she understood why and that was because any more detail closer to the truth would never be allowed into movie theatres. (e.g. the massacre at bangka island wasn't included in the movie).

reading about and seeing some of the things the japanese did made me sick to the stomach. we're so lucky to live in this day and age. i hope nothing like this ever happens again.. war is so futile. we can only make sure that we are thankful to those that went thru all that to protect our countries.

The reason atrocities have to be watered down is very little to do with the nature of war per se but is entirely to do with the nature of Hollywood studio film which aim for soap drama effect. The modern audience are used to seeing atrocities or gore on silver screen. The opening battle scence of Saving Private Ryan was a fairly realistic representation of actual battle. Plus, it had an added advantage of not getting in the way of good (hollywood) story telling.

One of the Australian nurses in this camp was the sole survivor of a group of 21 Australian nurses who were marched out to sea and shot in the back with a machine gun by the Japanese.

This does not appear in the movie primarily because it would have occurred at the beginning of the film, and anything after that would have been anti-climactic.

The scene of the woman being incinerated and the girl forced to crouch around spears also did not happen at this particular camp. Nurses who were there primarily report beatings and sexual predation as the biggest crimes of the Japanese - along with the fact that they starved all the women to death.

I agree that no film can ever portray the horror of POW camps, because it's something that has to be experienced to be fully felt.

Many movies do a great job at that, still. But somehow I think it's probably better to water it down a little, even though maybe it doesn't do the victims as much justice as it should, but when I think that even the soldiers who liberated the camps suffered so severly with that they saw and were for that traumatized and scarred for life, I understand that's not the feeling most POW films tries to convey to the audiences in the end. I suppose they try to focus on anti-war messages instead, so that the horror doesn't distract the audience away from the deeper philosophical matters that go with the experience. Maybe if we were shown those horrors in their full intensity we would leave the theatre feeling more hate than anti-war, and that would be conter-productive.

In my opinion I'd rather leave the full horror in detail to the documentary genre instead.
I'll never forget this example that really got under my skin. The example is a documantary called KZ, the subject in this case is the Holocaust; Sure there are many unforgettable Holocaust films but no such film could ever have prepared me for the cruelty of reality I saw in a documentary called "KZ" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0492469/). Nothing I ever saw has shaken me so much as that documentary to the point that it's been maybe years since I've see it and I still think about it sometimes, and when I remember what I saw it still stops me in my tracks, whatever I'm doing. It's like a wake up call to how violent and cruel people can be, and that film didn't need a drop of blood to make its mark.
I would recommend KZ to anyone, were it not that only those with a very strong stomach might be able to stand it. It's simply a masterpiece of documentary film, so moving it will leave anyone numb, you will think of nothing more right after you watch it and that feeling will endure, you will feel stunned, speechless and horrified and ultimately heartbroken at the cruelty people are capable of.
That's a good example of a subject that is watered down in movies to their own benefit and the audience's sensitivity, which I think is a good option in that it opens up the film to accommodate a wider audience, and then someone who is also interested in seeing the full graphic extent of the atrocities can turn to documentaries, knowing that's probably to be expected there.


"Of all thieves, fools are the worst; they rob you of time and temper." J. GOETHE