Listonixio Fresh and Exciting

Voxitype Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

Brainsbell The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

Taha Avalos The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

misstanyujie I saw the movie on a Chinese video forum. Unfortunately I missed around 70 percent of the dialog because it was in German with Chinese subtitles. The only parts I understood are the scenes that involved the other foreigners in the safety zone. I missed a great deal of what otherwise could have been a great film. The other languages spoken were Japanese and Chinese. I guess the film makers were trying to stay true to the actual event. While I could understand Chinese I could not read the Chinese subtitles when it came to characters speaking German or Japanese. I could only go by the actors acting to follow the story line. But not having the entire dialog made the story disjointed. However, this IS a story that needs to be told.

Robert J. Maxwell Impressive visual effects in this story of John Rabe, a German businessman running the Siemens factory in Nanking, China, as the city is first threatened, then occupied and its residents brutalized by the Japanese Army in 1937.Along with a handful of other internationals, Rabe is instrumental in forming a committee to operate the factory as a "safety zone" in which women and children are safe from the invading soldiers. His credentials as a German citizen, a formal ally of Japan, is one of his most important contributions to the task. It works, more or less, but not without suspenseful hitches.Not too much is shown of what the soldiers did to the citizens of Nanking, which is all for the good. Nobody would believe it. Three hundred thousand Chinese died at the time. That would be about half the population of contemporary San Francisco. The Chinese were eliminated wholesale and in a disorganized and whimsical way. Some of the living were used as bayonet practice targets. How does a culture that promotes such delicate arts as bonsai and origami, that is so terribly polite, manage to tolerate such brutality in its military? Nobody knows. The anthropologist Ruth Benedict tried to explain it in terms of the difference between "shame" and "guilt." At any rate, the cast varies in the way it fits the characters. John Rabe is played by Ulrich Tukur, the nominal hero, and he couldn't be a better choice -- distant, formal, and yet as mousy as Donald Pleasance with a mustache would have been. Anne Consigny as the French school mistress is strikingly beautiful and gives a fine performance. Steve Buscemi is, at first, the undiplomatically brash American doctor who hates Rabe for his Teutonic background but eventually learns to respect and admire him. Buscemi doesn't seem to belong. With his pale face, bulging eyeballs, and shark-like incisors, he looks more like Dracula than a doctor, and he sounds as if he just ran away from a Quentin Tarantino set.In a way it's a formula movie, rather like "Schindler's List", the kind of movie that wins awards. For the most part, the good guys are attractive and the bad guys are ugly. A handful of high-status types band together at the risk of their own lives to save several thousand Chinese. Certain select Japanese officers are clearly the villains but there's even a "good Japanese" who passes on warnings in an attempt to prevent more mass murders. The happy ending is requisite.But it's a moving story. How could it not be?

makelvin Prior to watching this file, I have read John Rabe's diary as well as Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking. I have also watched many documentaries and movies made about the subject from China as well as from the US. I found this film to be one of better film on this subject than most of the other ones in existence today.The film is based primarily on the actual diary of John Rabe. Certain details were filled-in by the excellent and exhaustive work of Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking. The importance of John Rabe's diary as opposed to the other accounts of what happened during the massacred is the fact that John Rabe was a German Nazi Party member that was working for Siemen in China. Germany was an allied of Japan at the time and there would have been no reason for John Rabe to have lied about atrocities committed by the Japanese if it did not actually happened. Also since John was mainly writing this as a personal diary for himself, there does not seem to be any reason for him to have exaggerated his description of the event. As a result, his diary is probably the credible historical account of the what actually happened in Nanking.I found some the Chinese version of the film on the subject seemed a little removed from the complex character interactions between most of these reluctant heroes of war. As a result, those movies does not seem quite as genuine and touching as this film.Most the events from this film seems very accurate or at least true to the overall sense of John Rabe's diary. Obviously some of the atrocities had to be consolidated to be able to fit those events into a slightly over two hour film. But one of the most puzzling inaccuracy of the film was the fictional character Valérie Dupres at the International Girls College. Why was it necessary for the film to use a fictional character's name instead of the actual courageous heroine Minnie Vaultrin from the Ginling Girls College. She had done so much during the massacred that it seems unfair to not use her real name in the film. This is my primary reason for not giving this film a perfect 10. If anyone can provide an explanation as to why Minnie Vaultrin name was not used in this film, I really would appreciate it.

kosmasp John Rabe is a person that actually existed and this is a (bit of a) fictionalized version of what he and the people he were trusted on, had to go through. Now this is the German version of that story. There is another side to that coin. And that other side is called "City of Life and Death" and is made from the Chinese perspective. So I guess the truth is somewhere in-between.But this fairly good made and has a strong character (actor) in the midst of it all. The story is really touching and involves a lot of bad things happening. But as written above, you will have sides that you will choose, whom you like and whom you don't. What it does have over the Chinese "version", is a main character you can hold onto.I'd suggest you watch both movies in a double feature to get the whole package.