Mal Walker I was just a young boy in England during WW2 and when you are young perils and worries don't affect you the same as an adult with family. One memory for me of those days happened to be after the war, when a couple moved into the house next to ours. The husband had been a prisoner on the Burma Railroad and he would sit at his window looking down the street for most of the day. Rarely would he venture out in his garden, and as a young fellow, playing outside and climbing walls etc. I can still see him sat at the window. My father an ex-army man made an acquaintance with the couple and one day asked the husband why he was at the window so much. "I'm just waiting" was all he would say. Now I'm getting on in years I think I understand more what he meant. I think he was waiting for closure, something that the 'Railway man' achieved in this movie. I wonder if my neighbour ever found it?.

Paul Creeden It is important to remember this film is based on true events between real people. Seeing this simply as a war film would miss the point. The film is exploring the stubborn disabling effects of war and violence on the mind. In a current Western world where PTSD is common in veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, we here about the veterans who kill or commit suicide. We hear the cry for more help by veteran organizations and government. This film gets down to the core issues which develop between individuals under the duress of bullying by patriotic leaders. Some comments here have decried the emphasis on torture. However, that torture on all levels is the subject of the film. The film isn't about the miraculous healing of a broken man by a woman. The sustaining support, albeit coolly English, of the tortured soldier by Kidman's character is a catalyst, not a cure.The scenes between Firth and Sanada are extremely well done. They reveal a process of grief and healing between two damaged people. Feeling pain and violence leading to forgiveness and friendship. The basis of all reconciliation and healing. I wonder if younger generations can appreciate the hard work this takes. I also wonder if they can appreciate the deep devastation of war and lethal violence on the human mind. They have been bathed in a media of violence.

thelasttwohundredyears In 1980, Eric (Colin Firth), traumatized WWII Pacific theatre veteran (and "railway enthusiast"—not "trainspotter") meets, (on a train, of course), long-time nurse Patti (Nicole Kidman). They converse, he about trains, she cattily about her intended travels. Within a few frames, they're married, and she finds out (oh!) that he's haunted by recollections. She can't get to him, so she talks to his wartime fellow prisoner, Finlay (Stellan Skarsgard). Finlay says she should keep to herself, but resolves to do something. Eric returns to the scene of the crime and meets his torturer. Back in England later, he gets a letter from his torturer, and decides to revisit the place, this time with Patti.This is a curiously bloodless film, in the sense of emotionlessness. One could not say that any of the acting performances are poor—Jeremy Irvine, as the young Eric (Firth) is plummily and not entirely annoyingly unwatchable. On a relatively small 18m budget, many scenes and locations are well brought to life. (Truly endless consortiums of taxpayer-funded state and national governments contributed to this film, so if you see this film, no matter how, you paid for it, big time, and the stars and the Weinstein Company got YOUR money, and no lawyer, no matter how expensive, could pretend otherwise.) But the film made back only maybe a quarter, at best, of its expenditure (wonder who got it?). Despite its gold-plated cast, its focus on war and romance and those bankable stars and those nasty enemies (in this case, the Japanese) why?Solipsism, indulgence, and mutual self-admiration. And maybe a story waiting too long to be told.The film is hobbled hopelessly by trying to pack too much in to too short a space. When you consider that this film is about lifelong and never-leaving trauma, the director's decisions to chop it up so close so that so many events happen so quickly over the course of a short-ish film (I saw the American cut), it kind of gives the lie to their noble views about making an important film about a forgotten event that just had to be known about. A bit like saying, "sure it's torture, but you'll get over it"—which is the obverse of the film's lofty purports.Maybe having to get so much public funding—i.e., yours and mine—so that the private sector would at last chip in, took some time. The long gestation and many false starts—these must have contributed to what the film became. Initial enthusiasm can wane and get diluted (or, yes, reanimated sometimes, though not in this case) across time. Who can dislike an economical film? But if you've got the stars, and heaven knows an endless script, let them work with it.Firth openly suggested Kidman, and Irvine, and, who's to say, possibly the international accountants who swung the deal.In the "bonus" material, narrated by the oddly off-pitch and off-styled Lisa Ling, each of the stars engage in talking about just how amazing it was to work with each other. In the commentary with director Jonathan Teplitzky and co-writer/producer Andy Paterson, both emote and slaver over just how amazing each of the scenes were, and just how amazing each of the actors were in being with each other. It only takes a little while of this before your stomach creeps up, and you can't help but think of what this film was supposed to be about, and how this story—any story, got hijacked by self-promoters and moral relativists.Surely this was a story that ought to have been told. But maybe, as for those actually involved, it just had to be gotten over, chalked up to life's enduring inhumanity.The real-life protagonist of the film, Eric Lomax, died shortly before it was released. In the extras, the filmmakers suggest that this was just as well, and as Eric wanted it, and it would have been too much for him to revisit the trauma (rather playing against their own chuffed-up self-imagined achievements).As a war story, this film fails. As a romance, it also fails. As an inward-looking self-congratulatory reel that sucked in public money to make quite a few rich people richer, well, that worked.

bobbyhollywood In times of war as well as other times, things are done which some do not consider normal, and in their judgments all is not always right. I must give the actors a lot of credit because they filled the characters most adequately, a look here, a step there, in my opinion they each measured what and how they were going to do it to convey the correct thought, and that is one of the important steps in acting.The story was not only compelling for me, but it rivaled many I have seen unfold, and as the others had done, this one had many turning points.Rent, buy or whatever, this is a very good film, and worth the viewing, although, not quite for the faint of heart.