Everybody seems to like this movie, but...

"Moreover, the major facts that the story is based on (gas chambers, Nazi collaborators, etc.) are not that alien or far-fetched."

Not really sure what you mean by this. It's based on a true story, so how could it be alien or far-fetched?

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The movie draws on certain facts from Miklos Nyiszl's memoir of his time in concentration camp, as well as Primo Levi's book The Drowned and the Saved (the movie takes its title from one of Levi's chapters), and various manuscripts by Sonderkommando discovered after the war and published collectively as Amidst a Nightmare of Crime. I don't believe the movie's author read any of these in the original languages (Hungarian, Italian, Yiddish). More importantly, however, I'm not sure he caught much of the point of any of them in the translations he did read. He seems busier grinding some private ax with the victims of mass murder.

I suppose some might find the movie "good" in the sense that it fits right in with popular slasher films, showing every little detail of horrible murders. Personally, I find it distasteful and trivializing for that very reason. But it's nice to know that others find the script as nonsensical as I did.

Whats so hard to follow about it? THe only thing I can think of is the intricies of how the Prison warder (Keitel) and the doctor realte to eachother, their power hiearchy and whatnot. Otherwise its as simple as groups of jews in different parts are planing on blowing up the furnaces and the rescue of a girl from the gas chambers puts their plans in Jeoporady. The Sideplot about the women workers being tortued for aiding the rebels is straight forward, as is the drama revolving around the little girl. Maybe you were confused about Buscemi being from a different section of Sunderkommandos that were planning to rebel as well, as the scenes clarifying the plot are early on.

Anyways, you can't complain about not being able to follow the film if you didn't see the whole thing. I don't think this movie is that hard to follow, but there are plenty of great movies out there that would be extremely hard to follow if you had not seen the opening 10 minutes. If you denounced those because you didn't see the first couple of scenes you'd just be making an ass of yourself.

And to mr. interlocutor, you think they went to far with the depiction of the murders? I realize they went a step beyond what we saw in Schindlers List (although even in that you see the exhumation and burning of a mountain of corpses) but I thought they were pretty restrained in that they didn't show the people getting gassed, they cutaway to the sunderkommando drinking and you just hear the screams. Its not like they actually cut to a shot of a body burning in an oven.

I am very familiar with the subject matter and find it horrifying. The cast and crew were serious about their work. But it was such an unrelenting depressing movie that I ended up relieved when it was over and won't watch it again.

What are they doing? Why do they come here?
Some kind of instinct, memory, what they used to do.