Watch The Bridge on the River Kwai For Free

Good concept, poorly executed.

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

Brilliant filmmaking. Suspenseful, articulate direction. Genius performances, starting with Alec Guinness, and all the way through. Even a great song and theme. Brilliant.

Movie Review: "The Bridge On The River Kwai" (1957)This splendid novel-adaptation going-out from author Pierre Boulle (1912-1994), royally-received to be directed by exceptional film-maker David Lean (1908-1991), threading every single shot to the scene to sequence to the finished movie, putting a fictious as dramatized "World-War-II" South-East Asian conflict brought onto an Burma-Siam-Railway enterprise thread to fail by issuing the title-given bridge into an adventure story of British soldiers, led by enduring the utmost single-cell, a breeding hot-box-torture of the imaginable with regard to motion-history-making character of Colonel Nicholson, portrayed by Alec Guinness (1914-2000) to the famous scene of marching to prison under the "Colonel Bogey March" accompanied by a run-down, bootstrapped platoon of leather-shoe broken, nevertheless morally-stabil soldiers of the Royal British Army into a painstaking-design detailing prisoner-of-war (POW) encampment ruled by an ordeal-wishing, hard-to-get-by as constant-overlooking Japanese Colonel Saito, portrayed by Academy-Award-nominated, but then failing to present legendary producer Sam Spiegel (1901-1985) with a "clean sweep" of 8 Academy-Award nominations to 8 wibns at the Oscars in its 30th edition on March 26th 1958 due to arguably overacted scenes of defeat by actor Sessue Hayakawa (1889-1973), when lucky-punch ease-spreading Hollywood actor William Holden (1918-1981) hardened in movie-future-perfect-action-cinema promising trainings by suspense-debriefs delivering actor Jack Hawkins (1910-1973) as Major Warden, earns all favors of an awestruck smash-hit-supporting international audiences in holiday season of 1957/1958, paving a the way for a new kind of "deus ex machine" enduring secret agent ingnited in the year 1962 by Albert R. Broccoli (1909-1996) and Harry Saltzman (1915-1994) by the code name of "007".© 2018 Felix Alexander Dausend (Cinemajesty Entertainments LLC)

Before I write IMDb reviews, I try to do as much research about the subject film as time allows. As part of my research, I always read a sampling of other user reviews in order to taste the prevailing sentiment of the film, pro, con, and indifferent. Many of the most negative reviews about this film object to the alleged falsification of history by the creators. Although I was disappointed with this latest viewing of the movie, I don't agree with these reviewers. The film is a work of fiction that is loosely based on a true, historical event, and that is how it is to be viewed. I recently watched "The Best Years of Our Lives", another film, much more to my liking, that is also centered on World War II but focused on an entirely different aspect of that war, the daunting adjustment of combat veterans to a civilian life back home in a world that was supposed to be peaceful but wasn't. As in the case of this film, that film was a work of fiction based on true experience, but neither film was intended to be a factual account of non-fiction. The actual combat disability of actor Harold Russell in "Best Years of Our Lives" is very real, but he doesn't portray himself or his own, personal story in the movie. In this case, no one is denying that Allied prisoners were treated much more harshly by their Japanese captors than depicted here or implying that the real colonel, upon whom the story is based, collaborated with the enemy as the fictional Colonel Nicholson did. My own problem with this film is that it opens with a very dramatic battle of wills between Colonel Saito and Lt. Colonel Nicholson and ends with an even more spectacular finale, but I found myself fairly bored in between. While the scenery of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) was quite spectacular, much of the dialogue was dull and even banal. Although the Siamese (Thai) women were very pleasant to behold, but there seemed to be a huge gap between the captivating beginning and the sensational ending. Alec Guiness, who was very reluctant to take the role of Nicholson, created an intriguing portrayal of the officer in charge of the Allied prisoners. Sessue Hayakawa was equally as good as his counterpart, the Japanese officer in charge of the prison camp. Many notable actors, including Charles Laughton, refused the role of Nicholson because they didn't understand his motivation, a view which should be appreciated. Others believed the material, based on a French author, to be viciously anti-British, which is also a reasonable interpretation. I was unimpressed by the rest of the cast, and I consider myself generally to be a fan of William Holden. His exchange with the bribed Japanese guard was nothing short of ridiculous. I was actually embarrassed for poor Bill, who didn't seem to be emotionally involved in the lame dialogue. As a result of the commendable performances of both Guinness and Hayakawa, the beautiful cinematography by Jack Hildyard, the film's trademark whistling of "Colonel Bogey's March", and an unforgettable ending that was worth the long wait, I rated it a 7 out of 10. I strongly disagree that fighting the Japanese and the Germans in the most effective way possible during World War II amounted to "madness" as this film seemed to suggest at the end. That is just wrong.

Wow this is still a powerful work. The Bridge on the River Kwai is David Lean's WW2 epic made several years before his masterpiece Lawrence of Arabia. It's not on that level of perfection, but it's still a damned great movie. They don't make films like this anymore. I remember being shown this film in a movie appreciation segment by a teacher in elementary school. I then would watch it every chance I got as I grew older. Alec Guinness and William Holden give what may be their best performances. Younger people raised on fast-paced CGI hyper-edited ADHD movies would probably complain that this is boring. Their loss, and dead wrong. THIS is how films should be made. Take your time with location work and character development. There is one particular shot in the jungle where the commandos are hunting a stray Japanese solder. They startle hundreds of bats from sleep, and the bats fill the sky. The shadows of the bats flicker on the jungle below, making the search even more difficult due to the eye being drawn all around to the shadows flickering on the leaves. Brilliant scene. If you haven't seen this movie, you owe it to yourself to watch it. "Madness."