When I decided to watch this movie, I got the impression it would be a low-budget B-movie, which would have many things wrong and suffer from bad acting.
Well, nothing was further from the truth, Although the first moments of the movie confirmed my suspicions - a plane was shown which was very obviously low-quality CGI - it was the pretty decent acting that caught my attention. I therefore decided to watch it for some more time, and boy, what a good decision this was.
Based on true events that took place as of June 1944, this movie takes place in a POW-camp of the German Luftwaffe, i.e. A so-called STALAG. I was most amazed by the pretty solid acting and the attention to detail.
I often irritate myself on wrong war uniforms, wrong types of weapons or even insignia. The director of this movie seemed to however have the same feeling. Because it is clear that much attention has been put to in these details. As such, this contributed big-time in getting the right "atmosphere", of seeing events that could really have taken place. Even the camp - likely the most difficuly to reconstruct - looked pretty "WW2 like".
Overall, I was glad that I decided to completely watch this movie. Because the true events that were at the basis of the movie, made this is good watch. It even raised a controversial point, like why Allied pilots had to bomb many civilian targets, which made me immediately remind the firebombings of e.g. Hamburg, Dresden or Tokyo.
With respect to the level of acting and character-development, I already mentioned that the acting is pretty solid. Especially interested were the way in which we learnt how both the german guard - whom was directly responsible for the group of POW's featured in this movie - and the english speaking camp officer that was also responsible for the translation between camp commander and prisoners. I think more could have been gained by focussing even more on these two german soldiers. But let me be honest, the movie on this aspect already far exceeded my expectations.
Concluding, I found this movie to deserve a score of 6.4/10, resulting in an IMDb rating of 6 stars. I had to think twice on whether this movie did not deserve a score that was somewhat higher, but that would make it a 7-star rated movie. And I think the movie did not have sufficient substance to make it that far. But let me be clear, this movie is a very decent watch.
