Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #112 in DVD
• Released on: 2009-05-18
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Format: PAL
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 131 minutes

Synopsis
DEFIANCE is a different kind of World War II movie, one that looks at the Holocaust from a unique angle--telling the true story of a group of Jews in Eastern Europe who fought back. On the run from the Germans and the local police, the three Russian Bielski brothers--Tuvia (Daniel Craig), Zus (Liev Schreiber), and Asael (Jamie Bell)--hide out deep in the forest. Their numbers swell as more and more refugees join them, coming together to form a community while also patrolling with guns and shooting the enemy to stay alive. But Tuvia and Zus have a falling-out over what future direction to take: Tuvia thinks it best to remain in the forest despite the coming vicious winter, but Zus wants to join the Russian resistance, which is aggressively attacking the Nazis. Complicating the situation are the women in their lives, known as forest wives--Lilka (Alexa Davalos) shows interest in Tuvia, Bella (Iben Hjelje) grows close to Zus, and young Chaya (Mia Wasikowska) and Asael flirt with the tingles of first love. As food grows scarce, diseases increase, and the Nazis become determined to find and kill them, the Bielski Otriad struggles to survive, battling back when necessary, including taking up arms.
Directed by Edward Zwick (GLORY, BLOOD DIAMOND) and based on the nonfiction book by Dr. Nechama Tec, DEFIANCE is a powerful thriller filled with tense human emotion, a gripping story about brotherly love and the basic human instinct to survive against all odds. Craig (LAYER CAKE, CASINO ROYALE), Schreiber (EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED), and Bell (BILLY ELLIOTT) are terrific as the Bielski brothers, three very different individuals who simply refuse to just lie down and die.

From the Back Cover
In UK cinemas from January 9 and based on an extraordinary true story, DEFIANCE is an epic tale of family, honour, vengeance and salvation.

The year is 1941 and the Jews of Eastern Europe are being massacred by the thousands. Managing to escape certain death, three brothers take refuge in the dense surrounding woods they have known since childhood. There they begin their desperate battle against the Nazis. Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber and Jamie Bell star as brothers who turn a primitive struggle to survive into something far more consequential – a way to avenge the deaths of their loved ones by saving thousands of others.

Acclaimed director Edward Zwick (Blood Diamond and The Last Samurai) brings to life this epic, edge-of-your-seat drama.

Daniel Craig	Liev Schreiber	Daniel Craig (left) and Liev Schreiber (right)
Daniel Craig	Jamie Bell	Jamie Bell (left) and Daniel Craig (right)
Daniel Craig	Alexa Davalos

Customer Reviews

Defiance
'Defiance' stars Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber and Jamie Bell as three Jewish brothers during World War II who are hiding deep in the forests in Poland to escape from the Germans. The brothers fight for food, weapons and stay alive and help other Polish Jews who are fleeing in masses from their homes.

I quite like war films and I thought this was a good change for the genre as it kept away from the typical solider stories that we see in most other films and saw what it was like from the perspective of the civilians who have had to leave everything.

The acting from the whole cast was very good despite some dodgy accents, the characters were fantastic, the settings and special effects were believeable, the script and storyline were very well written but the only problem was it did become very slow moving at certain stages of the film and I felt it did struggle to keep me as gripped with the story as I was expecting it to. Overall it is still a great film that I'd definitely recommend a watch.

3.5/5

MOVING AND SAD BUT ALSO TRIUMPHANT - EXCELLENT FILM
Daniel Craig forgets his Aston Martin and dinner suit to play a Jewish brother that forms a partisan force in the forests of Belarus in this WWII drama. It's difficult not to be type cast when you play 007 but Craig shows how versatile he is and does a mighty fine job of this role.

The story folows the original book about about Jewish resistance - retaliation, in the Second World War. Craig, Schreiber and Bell star as the Bielski brothers, Jews who escaped from Nazi-occupied Poland and formed a famous partisan army in the forest of Belarus.

Their aim is both to fight tooth and nail, and steal in to rescue who they can from the ghettos. The movie focuses on the plight of the jews and for once showing them as heroes as they survive in the freezing cold forest villages they have built with rebel Russian (true red army)soldiers, who fight and kill Germans who find their enclave and threaten to destroy it, which on one occasion they do.

But rebelling and seeking revenge for murder and rape is a key motivator, and perfectly demonstrated by Craig where he guns down the Nazi officer responsible for killing the Bielski parents, a scene Craig plays with the cold white hatred of Bond at his bloodiest.

The film is shot well, moves along at a good pace with no long spells of dialogue, but stirs the emotion of the sheer desperation of these people trying to both survive against incredible hunger, - 20 degree temperatures and alwasy looking out for Nazi bullets and bombs.

The fighting scenes are interspersed throughout the movie, and on the whole don't show too graphic violence or singling out of women and children being raped or murdered. This may though be part of the reason why the movie doesn't quite generate the sheer anger and hatred that makes you shed tears and stirs the adrenaline inside that puts you in the heart of the action baying for blood and revenge. For once though you can watch a world war two movie about Nazi's and Jews that doesn't get you reaching for the box of Kleenex.

The movie for me was a really pleasure to watch and it works well enough, but the film has one major stumbling block: the international cast are all required to speak English in Eastern European Yiddish accents and fail to achieve any sort of consistent pronunciation.

It's a distraction, but the burly Craig and Schreiber, as well as the slighter Bell, are all impressively expressive actors, and their sheer physical presence enables them to overcome the linguistic messiness.

So, to sum up if you like true WW2 movies, with a good cast, that is directed well with a beautiful soundtrack, then this is an interesting and heroic film that is well worth watching.

a cliche riddled attempt to tell a genuinely compelling tale
I am a big fan of war films, everything from classics like Ice Cold In Alex, Aces High and the Cruel Sea, through to the modern resurrection of the war movie that began with Saving Private Ryan and has subsequently given us the likes of the Thin Red Line, the Pianist and Battle of Haditha. Unfortunately, the current resurrection of the war movie has also given us the horrendous revisionism of the likes of U571 and the awfulness that is Pearl Harbour (less a war movie and more an excuse for Ben Affleck to strike poses in a variety of uniforms). Unfortunately, whilst Defiance takes an interesting and little known story from world war 2, it is so riddled with movie making clichés as to rob it of any sense of resonance.
The film tells the tale of the Bielski brothers, three Belorussian Jews whose families are wiped out by the Nazis and their collaborators, who then flee into the forest, and become the protectors of a disparate group of fugitive Jews. Whilst the middle brother Zus (Liev Schreiber) wants to take the fight to the enemy, whoever they may be, the eldest brother Tuvia (Daniel Craig) wants to protect the fugitives from both Nazi repression and extermination, and help them rebuild their lives and simply survive. It is this story of survival against the odds that forms the core of the film.
Director Edward Zwick, who has never really given us anything to match the power and emotion of his feature debut Glory, can direct amazing action/battle sequences but is less effective when dealing with the human aspect of conflict, and it is obvious once again here. Whilst Craig and those around him (particularly Jamie Bell as the youngest brother) give the material they have to work with a good go, it is unfortunately so cliché ridden as to rob it of any emotional involvement. The trials and tribulations, whilst based on truth, never seem totally convincing, with everything from traitors in the ranks, self sacrifice and love amongst the horrors of war being thrown at us in an attempt to make us empathise with the people up on screen. Liev Schrieber as Zus is the best thing in the movie by a good distance, playing his character as a man driven by revenge who is also a ruthless pragmatist, and whilst he is not utilised in the film nearly enough, every scene he is in he is on the whole electric (except for a few moments of suffocating sentimentality).
Whilst the story is never less than compelling, the delivery leaves a great deal to be desired, and at certain moments it seems obvious that Zwick is attempting to emulate Elem Klimov's Come and See, a movie that deals with a very similar subject matter in a far superior way.