Savior
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Dennis Quaid, Stellan SkarsgardBrand: Sony
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled)
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: Anamorphic Widescreen, 2.35:1
Running Time: 103 minutes
DVD Release Date: 1999-04-20
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Movie Reviews of Savior
Movie Review: It's a great movie people...
Summary: 5 Stars
Wow, this movie is a tough one to watch.
This film is not intended to be a factual account of the 1991-1995 war in the Balkans. It is an allegorical piece intended to show the immorality of revenge killing/raping and the denial of those who witness the event. The personification of that immorality is the main character, a mercenary, devoid of emotion and in denial of the whole situation. He awakens from his insanity towards the end but I'm not sure if he will ever overcome the past. Will the Balkans ever overcome their past?
The transition of the main character from father to killer and back to father is also allegorical to the Balkan region. How many times in the past has the region turned from peaceful to horrific to back to peace? I'm not sure if it's possible to count how many times. And every time the motive has been revenge over some injustice. Is there something bad in the water there?
The genius of the film is it's ability to show both the passivity of the victims as well as the utter lack of reaction by the perpetrators of random acts of extreme cruelty to humans. It portrays this as well as any holocaust film I've ever seen. The cowering grandmother and the image of the sledge hammer being drawn out of the golf bag still chills my soul and brings tears to my eyes. It's the sheep to the slaughter kind of thing. The cow, chewing it's cud, who looks lazily at the guy in the rubber apron holding the bolt gun. A gentle wave of the glove, you to the workhouse, you to the oven. Except the oven in this case is 10 pounds of iron wielded by a maniac in a uniform. Not even useful, as the Japanese commanders claimed bayonet practice was on live victims. Just inhuman brutality for brutality's sake.
And that's the point of the film. Not great armies fighting each other for the survival of political boundries. But rather people fighting each other for personal reasons. And that's the most brutal kind of warfare there is. no Geneva Convention applies under those circumstances.
I do agree with some reviewer's comments that the movie has a Serbian slant. But that's who the main character sided with. And he should not be considered a good guy. Neither should any of the combatants who targeted civilians, whatever the reason. I don't think it detracts from the main story as I don't think this is a finger pointing movie. The only finger points right back at each one of us because that's where the brutality stems from. Inside of each and every one of us.
Summary of Savior
SAVIOR - DVD MovieFilmed in Montenegro and based on true accounts of the early '90s ethnic clashes between Serbia and neighboring states, Savior is a harrowing triumph for Serbian director Pedrag Peter Antonijevic and actor Dennis Quaid. For Antonijevic, who shaped Robert Orr's script through his own knowledge of the Serb-Bosnian struggle, the story provides the daunting challenge of putting a human face on a monstrous chapter in modern Europe's geopolitical evolution, and of transcending nationalism by capturing an even-handed but hardly unemotional portrait of the "war psychosis" that only partly explains the deep, divisive hatreds at work. For Quaid, Savior rescues his artistic reputation after too many formulaic studio outings that attempted merely to cash in on his wolfish charms.
Quaid is Joshua Rose, an American in Paris traumatized by the death of his wife and child in an Islamic terrorist bombing, wreaking immediate and fateful vengeance on innocent Muslim worshippers, then escaping into a new life as a mercenary supporting Bosnian Serbs. Under the nom du guerre Guy, Rose is a remorseless, nearly comatose presence until he intervenes in a brutal attack on a Serbian woman (Natasa Ninkovic) pregnant from a Muslim rape. Guy's gradual immersion in his charge's destiny brings him face to face with the centuries-old political, religious, and cultural feuds that haunt the region, and Quaid's own salvation comes through a remarkably subdued, sober performance. That restraint, and Quaid's haggard, close-cropped features are all but unrecognizable to those more familiar with his cocky, grinning turns as a more conventional hero.
Antonijevic makes the journey absorbing and, ultimately, elegiac, punctuated by a few brief but convincingly gruesome action sequences including a civilian massacre that would have been the climax of a more conventional war film. Instead, it's Quaid's own epiphanies that distinguish this probing, heartbreaking drama. The DVD edition retains the original widescreen aspect ratio and includes an audio commentary from the director. --Sam Sutherland.
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