The Bridge on the River Kwai review

I saw The Bridge on the River Kwai for the first time a few weeks ago, and I really enjoyed it. What surprised me was how long I spent trying to figure out exactly how I was supposed to feel about Colonel Nicholson, because from my perspective this British commander is kind of a prick from the beginning. The movie initially gives you every reason to get behind him, but the longer it goes, the more you realize that what looks like principle and courage can also be arrogance, class consciousness and an almost insane commitment to being right.

Nicholson and his British soldiers have surrendered and are being held in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. Colonel Saito, the Japanese commander, orders everybody to work on the bridge his prisoners are building, including the British officers. Nicholson refuses. Under the rules governing prisoners of war, his officers aren't supposed to be forced into manual labor, and Nicholson is willing to put himself through an enormous amount of suffering rather than give Saito an inch on that point. So naturally you're cheering for him. He's a prisoner standing up to his captor, insisting that even the Japanese have to follow the rules of war, and refusing to be broken.

But the longer this fight goes on, the more I kept thinking about what Nicholson is actually fighting for. His great moral stand is that the officers shouldn't have to do manual labor with the grunts. There's an actual legal rule behind his position, so he's right about that, but the class sensibility underneath the whole thing is pretty hard to connect with now. Nicholson would apparently rather be tortured than have his officers pick up a shovel next to their own soldiers. He treats the distinction as something fundamental to maintaining military order and British civilization itself. I understand the argument. I also think he's kind of an asshole.

That's where the movie starts getting really interesting, because Nicholson wins. Saito has a deadline to get this bridge built, the project is going badly, and he needs the British prisoners and their officers to get it done properly. Nicholson breaks him in this battle of wills and gets exactly what he demanded. You would think that would be the end of Nicholson's fight. Instead, once he gets control over his men again, he decides they're going to build Saito the best damn bridge they possibly can.

And this is where you start wondering what the hell Nicholson is doing.

His pride in himself, his men, British discipline and British engineering gradually becomes more important to him than the rather obvious fact that they're building a strategically important bridge for the enemy. He starts treating the bridge almost like a monument to himself and his men. The same stubbornness that made him admirable when he was standing up to Saito starts looking increasingly crazy when he's using it to help Saito succeed. Nothing fundamental about Nicholson has actually changed. The circumstances have changed, and suddenly the qualities you were cheering for earlier in the movie look very different.

William Holden's Shears gives you almost the exact opposite approach. He doesn't have Nicholson's grand sense of principle. He's trying to survive. He'll lie, fake what he needs to fake and do whatever he has to do to make it through another day. Nicholson would probably consider him dishonorable. I found his approach considerably easier to understand. If I'm stuck in a Japanese POW camp, I'm probably a lot less concerned about demonstrating the superiority of my military traditions than I am about not dying there.

Eventually all of these different motivations come together around the bridge, and I'm not going to give away how that plays out because I somehow managed to avoid knowing the ending all these years. If you've done the same, you should get to experience it that way.

What I really liked is that the movie doesn't tell you that one of these men has figured everything out while everybody else is wrong. Nicholson is brave, disciplined, intelligent and an extremely effective commander, but he's also arrogant and becomes obsessed with something that increasingly makes no sense for the side he's supposedly fighting for. Saito is running a brutal prisoner-of-war camp, but the movie still gives him enough humanity that you understand the pressure he's under, his humiliation when Nicholson beats him and what failure means for him personally. Shears is cynical and self-interested, but his basic desire to stay alive may be the most relatable motivation anybody in the movie has.

Nobody is clean, and that's what I liked. These aren't characters who suddenly become stupid because the plot needs them to do something. Nicholson doesn't become a different person when he becomes obsessed with the bridge. He's the exact same stubborn, prideful, principled man he was when you were cheering for him against Saito. The movie just keeps changing the circumstances around him until you're forced to reconsider whether those qualities were as admirable as you initially thought they were. Everybody's behavior grows out of who the movie has already shown them to be.

That's also why the bridge itself works so well. You spend enough time watching these men build the thing that you start taking pride in it with them. You see them organize themselves, solve the engineering problems and turn this disaster of a construction project into something impressive. At some point you actually want them to finish it. Then you remember they're building the fucking bridge for the enemy.

I really liked that. The movie gets you emotionally invested in something that you know, rationally, you should want to fail. It does it without cheating or forcing its characters into decisions just to move the plot. Everything comes out of their personalities, their pride and the things they believe about themselves. By the end, all of that stuff that initially seemed like a fairly straightforward POW story has turned into this strange psychodrama about pride, duty, survival and what happens when commitment to principle becomes detached from the reason the principle existed in the first place.

This is just a really well-made movie. I wish more modern movies trusted their characters enough to let a story develop this way instead of constantly forcing everybody toward the next plot point. The Bridge on the River Kwai takes its time, establishes exactly who these people are and then lets their personalities create the conflict. I can see why it's considered a classic. I really enjoyed it, and if you've somehow gone this long without seeing it like I had, it's absolutely worth watching.