The Railway Man

(M) ★★★★

Director: Jonathan Teplitzky.

Cast: Colin Firth, Jeremy Irvine, Nicole Kidman, Stellan Skarsgard, Hiroyuki Sanada, Tanroh Ishida.

Colin didn't believe in trains, which ultimately meant nothing to the oncoming train.

David Lean's 1957 war story The Bridge On The River Kwai may be rightfully revered as a classic film, but it's never been highly acclaimed for its veracity.

While it never shirked away from the fact that war is "madness", to quote its last line, it barely scratched the surface of the reality of the atrocities inflicted on the POWs and slaves that worked on the Thailand-Burma Railway - an endeavour not called the Death Railway for nothing.

In The Railway Man, based on the book by British POW Eric Lomax, we are presented with those atrocities and the lingering after-effects in far more graphic detail.

And while the details of Lomax's personal story have been changed, most of the important themes remain, as does the impact of what happened between Lomax and one of his Japanese captors many years later.

When not focusing on what happened to Lomax on the Burma Railway (where he's played by Jeremy Irvine), it looks at his life in 1980s, where the older Lomax (Firth) has settled down with his new wife Patti (Kidman).

Unfortunately, his newfound happiness seems to kick his post-traumatic stress disorder into overdrive, leaving Lomax a distant and haunted mess prone to nightmares and strange outbursts.

Concerned for her husband's mental health, Patti contacts one of Lomax's army buddies (Skarsgard) and tries to uncover what happened in the darkest days of working on the railway.

Firth's performance is top-notch. He portrays the damaged ex-soldier as hollowed-out yet still human and hopeful, as both broken and angry, as distant yet somehow sympathetic and ultimately likeable. It's a tough turn and a great one to rival his Oscar-winning role in The King's Speech.

And let's not forget young Irvine (best known previously as the lead in War Horse), who not only makes the torture scenes and other hardships believable but also gives a more than passable impersonation of a young Firth (or should that be a young Lomax?).

Sanada as Takashi Nagase and Skarsgard are also excellent. Kidman gets the short straw with the least developed main character in the film (who also happens to be the plot's catalyst) but still performs admirably, despite being the one who has to deliver many of the script's lesser lines.

The subject matter is obviously confronting but the film is not graphic. It's certainly intense and there's no shying away from what went on between the Japanese forces and their POWs, but the important thing is it helps build towards the emotional outpouring at the end, where all the themes of hate and healing, forgetting and forgiving, and vengeance and vitality meet.

The biggest problem with The Railway Man is its disjointed delivery, which flips back and forth between the war and the '80s, slowing the pace and creating a jarring effect as we switch time periods. Having said that, it's hard to think of a better way of dealing with the alternating eras.

Outside of one major CG sequence which presents the fall of Singapore as a backdrop, the film doesn't go for any big flashy visual moments. The English sequences are typically grey and sombre, while the jungles of Burma and Thailand (filmed partly in Australia) are hot and yellow.

What's interesting about this film, aside from its amazing reality-based climax, is that it's a rare look at what happens after the guns have stopped firing and the soldiers have gone home. So often we see the battles and the intensity, but the lasting impact of the war wounds - both physical and mental - is rarely shown. Such movies do exist - The Best Years Of Our Lives is a good example - but they're far less common than "war movies".

With it's impressive performances, The Railway Man is a great example of a "post-war movie".