'Private Peaceful' movie review
The film ‘Private Peaceful’ is based of Michael Morurgo’s book of the same name that was released in 2003. The movie was released 9 years later in 2012. The movie follows the life of Tommo Peaceful as well as his experiences of war, love and other emotions.
Although ‘Private Peaceful’ is very different from the book, it has several strong points that make the movie a good watch. The majority of the strong scenes happened during their time at war. For instance, when the gas rolled into the trenches there was lots of screaming and gunfire which made the scene very dramatic while never breaking away from our main character, Private Tommo Peaceful. Another strong moment is when Charlie and Molly have an argument over whether Charlie should go back to war Charlie acts like a protective mother and insists to be sent back. Molly and Charlie haven’t had an argument like this before which means this was development of their marriage. Even though it has its strong points, there were a lot of points that could be improved.
‘Private Peaceful’ could be a lot better, no matter about the strong points. For instance, even though I know there supposed to be brothers, it was never clear enough which on was Charlie and which one was Tommo which made the scenes that were supposed to be emotion made me very confused because I didn’t know whether it was supposed to be a heart touching moment or Tommo realizing his emotions. When I watched the scene where Tommo and Charlie had a fight, I was unsure who was winning and all the times Charlie was with Molly it always made me see Tommo talking to Molly which is something I feel that Tommo wouldn’t have the courage to do. Another bad part of ‘Private Peaceful’ is that a lot of the emotional scenes from the book where mostly taken out. For instance, Big Joe was supposed to go missing except in the movie he never did which took out a lot of the suspense which made the book amazing.
Although the movie was good it didn’t have the same emotional effect on me as the book did. This is because I didn’t get connected to the characters in the same way as I did in the book. This is because there were less opportunities to relate to the characters as we don’t learn a lot about their past other than a few bits. The book also had a lot more surprises which made it more suspenseful when something was dragged out. Despite this, I defiantly learned something from the movie and that is the importance of family and how they can help you pull through.
In conclusion, the movie had it’s good points and it’s bad but the book was a lot better.
