Purely Joyful Movie!

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

The railway man was the only solution that television offered that evening next to stupid game shows or standard, boring action movies. The description was not very hope giving (to confront his former enemy from a japanese war camp) and we feared some horror-torture scenes. We were blown away, I admit it...it's an intense movie that shows how extreme traumas can impact a human being. The torture scenes were limited to the amount needed to show the horrors that people can do to each other, the focus was constantly more on the mental problems and questions on how to handle life with these traumas and to confront them. It shows how horrible people can to each other but also how beautiful. And that war does not end in the minds of people when the fighting stops.highly recommended

I was just a young boy in England during WW2 and when you are young perils and worries don't affect you the same as an adult with family. One memory for me of those days happened to be after the war, when a couple moved into the house next to ours. The husband had been a prisoner on the Burma Railroad and he would sit at his window looking down the street for most of the day. Rarely would he venture out in his garden, and as a young fellow, playing outside and climbing walls etc. I can still see him sat at the window. My father an ex-army man made an acquaintance with the couple and one day asked the husband why he was at the window so much. "I'm just waiting" was all he would say. Now I'm getting on in years I think I understand more what he meant. I think he was waiting for closure, something that the 'Railway man' achieved in this movie. I wonder if my neighbour ever found it?.

Moving drama based on the WWII experiences of Eric Lomax a Prisoner of War forced to work on a railway in Burma following the fall of Singapore to the Japanese.Lomax is played in two time-lines by Jeremy Irvine in the war and Colin Firth in his older years.He and his colleagues endure severe torture at the hands of their Japanese soldier captors forcing severe post traumatic stress disorder long after the war has ended.Lomax is a railway geek hence the title of the film. His demons come back to haunt him once he finds love with Patti (a rather boring Nicole Kidman) and the identity of one of his torturers is revealed as still being alive by wartime friend Finlay (Swedish Stellan Skarsgard). After travelling back to the site of his capture he finds forgiveness to the Japanese 'translator' soldier.The story is very interesting and emotional but the trouble with Colin Firth films I find is he plays pretty much the same character in all of them. A broody stiff upper lip Englishman. The film has a documentary feel like an episode of Michael Portillos Railway Journeys but on the whole provides a worthy film to watch.

I love WW2 movies. I really like Colin Firth. I'm not entirely a huge fan of Kidman, but she's okay. ( not that I think she acts terrible, but always seems to just over do it, rather. Except in 'The Other's..' she was great in that...) I don't know what it is exactly, but for how terrible the suffering this young man was supposed to endure through his ordeal as a POW, it just almost came across a bit cheesy on this film. Like a Lifetime TV movie. Not that I enjoy watching blood , guts and gore, or the misfortune of others. It's just usually with this type of film, I feel a sense of misery, or anger, or foreboding or SOMETHING with the situation within the story. This film just didn't have that affect on me. I felt nothing, but a bit bored. Right from the beginning. For this type of story, I just felt it was executed poorly. The story itself is good and of course the acting is as good as one would expect from the choices. It just didn't have the WOW factors that make my heart race with trepidation or elation. It will not be a movie that will stick with me. I'm being nice and giving it a 6...