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Sorry, this movie sucks

One of my all time favorites.

I'll tell you why so serious

The acting in this movie is really good.

Ambitious movie, it ends on a poetic miserable and full of stereotypes vision typical of a Hollywood brain that looks at and judges while ignoring completely European world: despite the war they are living Italians are seen as idiot pricks always ready to sing as jesters in the bar, while the captain has his head into pussy rather than the fate of his soldiers; poor Germans then are the eternal bad guys, that even if motivated by a flash of humanity or living passion, as in the case of the captain, remain those cold like robotic thinking- machines unable to love or feel ... Well! maybe the intent was to obtain atmospheres or emotions like in "Mediterrano", but Salvatores is something else. Director should change job, loss of time !

I haven't read the book so I'm not anal about the movie digressing from the original plot. But it's still a horrible movie. If you want to make a schlocky love movie with Nicholas Cage affecting a risible Italian accent like out of some Little Cesar's Pizza commercial, be my guest. But please show some respect and don't base it on a real tragedy, the bloody German-Italian occupation of Greece in the Second World War and the 1943 massacre of 9000 Italian troops by the Germans.To be fair to the movie, Penelope Cruz does her usual excellent job of playing an attractive girl who painfully holds out against her romantic feelings before eventually giving in to love. The only problem is that I've seen her in this role before. Other than that, the movie is 1950ies-type of inane. The Greeks are proud archetypes (but hey, daddy's still all for emancipation and that), the Italians are jolly opera boffins, and the Germans uptight, evil maniacs. Beautiful, proud Pelagia is betrothed to a resistance fighter but has the hots for a jaunty Italian soldier. You connect the dots. That's really all there is to it.The sad thing is that the entire plot's long been done before, a million times better, and with infinitely more charme, in the 1991 Italian movie Mediterraneo. If you like the general idea of a romantic comedy about Italians occupying a Greek island, and going native in the process, you've struck gold. Captain Corelli's Mondolin, on the other hand, is trite sh*te.

I didn't read the book, so I didn't have expectations either way when I watched this movie. I bought the DVD as "previously viewed" because I like Nicolas Cage. I loved the movie myself, for several reasons. I'm an incurable romantic, so I loved the romance. I knew that the romance between Pelagia, (Penelope Cruz), and Madras, (Christian Bale), was doomed from the start, for the same reason stated by her father, (John Hurt). He just wasn't her intellectual equal. They would never have had a happy marriage. Plus, he demonstrated that he took her love for granted by not getting a literate friend to answer her letters. What an idiot! He just didn't deserve her. It's no wonder that she stopped loving him. It's also no wonder that, in spite of herself, she fell in love with a cultured, literate, music loving man like Captain Corelli, (Nicolas Cage). I also love location movies with majestic scenery. It's one of the things that make The Great Escape such a great movie. I'm also a military history buff, especially WWII history. I love it when I learn something new about WWII from a movie. That's another thing this movie has in common with TGE. It's reasonably historically accurate, (see the Wikipedia articles "Axis occupation of Greece in World War II" in the section "Nazi atrocities" and "Kefalonia" in the section "World War II"). It's a historical fact that the average Italian civilian or soldier had no great love for either Mussolini or Fascism. It's also a historical fact that the Nazis knew this, and so they didn't have much respect for the Italians. However, I hadn't known about how the Germans turned on the Italians like rabid dogs after Italy surrendered to the Allies. That said, it came as no surprise when it happened in the movie. It also didn't surprise me that Captain Weber, (David Morrissey), was sickened by the atrocity. It's another historical fact that the majority of German soldiers and sailors, both officers and enlisted men, weren't Nazis, and had no great love for those who were. With a few exceptions, most of the atrocities carried out by the German military were done by the SS, the concentration camp guards, or by special groups that were made up entirely of fanatical Nazis. Never forget that the German military was organized on the Prussian model, which emphasized strict obedience to superiors, and for officers, rigid adherence to their oaths. Which is why Hitler had the German officer corps swear an oath of personal allegiance to him after he came to power. To those who couldn't understand why the partisans hung the woman who showed affection to the German officer and didn't do the same to Pelagia, it was BECAUSE the woman showed affection to a German, and Pelagia fell in love with an Italian, who fought to resist the Germans in the end. Finally, to those who knock this movie because it's different from the book, SO WHAT? When is a movie adaptation EVER totally faithful to the book it's based on? Also I read in someone else's post that the author finally admitted that he didn't do enough research and got his facts wrong in his portrayal of the partisans. So, all in all these are the reasons I LOVE this movie, and I urge anyone who either hasn't read the book, or realizes that the movie isn't going to be a carbon copy of it, or has an interest in WWII history, or is an incurable romantic like me, to see this movie. 10/10

When I first saw the trailer for this movie, I was under the impression that Nicolas Cage's character was an American soldier, and that Penelope Cruz was the Italian. This was thought because of Cage's horrific attempt at an Italian accent with the line "Bella bambina at 12 o'clock" (or something like that). I assumed he was trying to fake an accent to be silly as he was marching around what I thought was Italy. The accents were horrible, and as always, Penelope Cruz sounds like a squeaky chihuahua trying to squeeze out her lines. And lets not forget about Christian Bales accent, wow, sounded like he was trying to speak through a ball of cotton stuffed in his mouth. And if the accents weren't bad enough, during the love scene between Cage and Cruz, you get a glimpse of pit hair from not Cage, but Cruz! Maybe that was the norm for women in Greece back then, but that's not what just doesn't fly in a love scene these days. Put this DVD back on the shelf at the video store and walk right past, you can't get the wasted 2 hours of your life back.