Fresh and Exciting

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

There are two films wrapped up in this one. The first could have been a powerful character study of the realities of the Soviet advance through Germany. It could have shown how the excitement of nationalism gave way to the harsh reality of war with friends lost and lives destroyed.The second, a sub-standard cold war spy thriller, could've been left as a thirty minute radio play judging from the poor voice-over narration that was going on.The acting from the segments set in the 1960s is poor at best and littered with third-rate clichés around torture, disaffected communists and secret codes. To make matters worse an interracial love story is thrown in and handled with all the style of a wet lettuce.In the 1940s segments there's some reasonable acting going which suffers from not enough time to develop the characters and rather bland lighting and filming. There isn't a sense of grittiness or realism to help build the story.Overall a wasted opportunity.

I watched this mini-epic in a hotel in Abu Dhabi four years ago. I recently picked it up on DVD as I fancied watching again to see if it was as powerful as I remembered; it was! I see from wiki the story was inspired by the book "Berlin the Downfall 1945" by Antony Beevor (to some extent at least) which, although the film is not set in Berlin but in Silesia, does make a lot of sense. I applaud the way the film shows the destruction, defeat, reconstruction, then re-emergence of identity, of a nation – through the transformation of a teenage boy into adult life. Aside from the frighteningly realistic combat, the horrific gang-rapes, and the depiction of an all-colourful swinging sixties London – a major feature that struck me on my second viewing was that the success of Thomas' journey (the journey of the German nation, personified as a sensitive male) is only made possible by his involvement with females. This I found interesting and quite unusual. Melanie (his first true love) sacrifices herself so that he may live another day; Astrid (the refugee nurse) gets him out of the front-lines and instructs him to toughen up; Tanya (the Russian tank-girl) takes him from the gutter of the occupied zone to a military school in Russia; Stephanie (the East-German spy) informs the KGB that he has defected – the most complex of all his female 'helpers'; and Yvonne (the black Mod girl) gives him affectionate love and inspires him to develop. All in all, extremely deep and layered material and much more contextual than most war-spy films. It made me wonder if it had originally been written as a novel.

clumsy and heavy handed...I wanted more London and less flashback and the narrative just doesn't work. The rape scenes are really unnecessary and add nothing to the story. Less telling and more showing would have helped this movie. The more I watched the more I fast forwarded through the WW2 scenes (which is weird for me) and shot to the spy / intrigue elements. Funnily enough though after the movie and I had gone our separate ways I still enjoyed the redeeming features, namely, the concepts tackled in the movie - loyalty, the past, control and freedom. Hey who thought to the put the SAME surf rock song in the girlfriend London scenes? Whacky...

I didn't expect much when I rented this relatively low budget English language WW2 flick set on the Eastern Front – not a great start and up against greats like "Cross of Iron" and "Enemy at the Gate" not to mention US and German productions such as "Downfall" and "Saving Private Ryan", but I couldn't resist the T-34 tanks which adorn the DVD sleeve design. However, I was pleasantly taken aback. "Joy Division" is IMO European cinema at its best and shows that we Brits can make powerful, thought provoking drama too.SPOILERS – the film is the biopic of protagonist Thomas, who starts off as a Hitler Youth troop in the last months of WW2 and ends up as a Soviet spy in the Cold War. The story unravels in flash-back and flash-forward between 1945 to 1962 and bookended with a third contemporary setting in 1970s South America where he has fled (like so many other ex-Nazis, ex-Soviets), and is bound by Thomas' inner-struggle not only to re-discover his lost identity, but to come to terms with the trauma of his lost love.In keeping with so many other cinematic epics, "Joy Division" is at times terribly depressing yet never slow in pace and the bursts of wartime action and moments of innocent tenderness keep you glued to the screen. The WW2 segments are by far the more enthralling of the film but rely on the dialogue heavy Cold War segments to make sense of the futility of war and it's dreadful after affects, which for me was the underlying point of the movie.The film's emotional core comes with Thomas' doomed romance with Melanie. The two 15 year old lovers spend their time flirting at Hitler Youth rallies but as they begin to develop something much deeper the Red Army invade eastern Germany and Thomas is thrust into hopeless battle as one of the defenders of the crumbling Reich. No brutality is spared as the story takes one dark turn after another. As columns of refugees run westwards for their lives, Thomas goes up against fleets of Russian tanks in battle scenes nothing short of "Saving Private Ryan", while Melanie is captured twice and violently gang-raped by dozens of Soviet troops each time. Surviving the onslaught and finally reunited as the war comes to an end, Thomas is witness to Melanie's third gang-rape and henceforth the breaking point of the young lad's life.Reflecting on his wartime experiences while caught up in a Kafkaesque Cold-War conspiracy in 1960s Moscow and London, Thomas the KGB agent is forced to re-explore himself and eventually he re-defines his lines of loyalty. The film has a surprisingly happy end of sorts and uniquely combines war drama, action, and political thriller.