A Private War

Painful yet inspirational life Story! Reminds me with myself and my days in Syria! Marie Colvin had been carrying a great message during her life, and she died in the sake if this message! What a brave women! RIP Marie :(!

A very different role for Rosamund Pike then Gone Girl or any other film she has made recently. She takes the care in embodiment of Marie Colven, trying to give her truth life. This is not an easy movie to watch, harsh scenes of war-torn countries and showing real people that have actually been effected by real tragedies. While watching I definitely felt that Matthew Heineman was trying to give the realest depiction of this story. I often felt a little underwelmed with the pacing of this movie, it flips back and forth to the past and present a little too much for me and not focusing long enough on either for the full character development. Rosamund Pike did give a great performance and Marie Colvin's story is worth watching.

A great journalist that sacrificed just about everything to get the true stories out. I predict an Oscar nomination for her role. She worked so hard to get the role down right.

This film actually tells the story from one side, american terror side. It is about selfish woman, who dont care about the true. Only to hide behind her story, not reality. The film is also missing the point

All cinematic characteristics covered in "A Private War" were good except for the most important part, which is the credibility of the story. I can't claim that the stories covered by "Mary" in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan were false or phony, but I am 100 % sure that what she said about Syria was a distortion and biased and unethical. Especially that statement during her broadcasting with CNN, and telling lies about the nature of the conflict, picturing it as if the Syrian president was sending the army to kill children, which is typically the method was used to direct audience consciousness towards an emotional issue away from the intrinsic truth, that the terrorists used families as human shields. Note that western media insisted on using phrases like "Assad Army" to implant a false idea in the audience conscious that this is Assad's war against civilians using a merciless army under his command, while it was actually a horrible war against thugs and criminals and later against Al qaeda and ISIS. I personally lived in that city and I can assure that what "Mary" said was her biased point of view, affected by the place she was reporting from, and she didn't bother to move to the other side of the city to see how we were taken hostages by the opposition gangs who later in 2012 took our neighborhood, my home, kidnaped my closest friend, choked him with a metal wire with cold blood and claimed that the regime was responsible. Only a terrorist or a "Moslem Brotherhood member" or any other radical moslm will support and believe her story. May her soul rest in peace.

As an American independent voter- this is liberal garbage celebrating a "powerful and brave" woman who drove herself into the ground to tell the story of how bad muslims have it, knowing damn well it's because they are in fact muslims. It's well acted and put together well, just the entire content is political AF. If you decide to watch for yourself, when you get bored and annoyed with the chain-smoking drunken old woman running around without a care for her own life or her own team's lives, just skip to the last five minutes.

I expected a high quality movie when reading all the praise about it, but instead it felt like I was watching a poorly made History channel film. The movie plays out in chronological order, pinpointing certain moments in Marie Colvin's career, but not quite making it's point why those moments were significant. So many scenes would be set up, only to jump to something else. Or there would be scenes that would linger too long, when you felt it probably should have been cut. The director definitely needed a better editor. As for the Marie Colvin character, you never really get to find out what makes her tick. You do get a sense that she's dealing with some trauma of being in war zones, but you don't get a sense of why she's doing it. And she doesn't come across as being a likeable character. In fact, when she dies, it felt like 'oh well', because we were basically shown that she was too stubborn for her own good, and that's what got her killed. And overall, this movie really doesn't have a message. Maybe it's 'war is hell', although those scenes didn't feel natural, everything felt a bit too forced. It's too bad the director chose to edit the film the way he did. The jarring jumps takes one out of the movie. Just when you think you're figuring things out, it jumps to something else. Really distracting, and I just wanted them to get to Homs, Syria (which we were constantly reminded of over and over again). My rating is just to counter the excessively positive ratings.

A War movie which is said from the POV of a journalist and focuses more on civilians than soldiers is exactly what we need in the time of ever growing militarism and wars. Rosamund Pike carries the film on her shoulders and delivers the best leading performance by an actress this year and probably the best in her career. You would think that its a documentary and not a feature film sometimes, that's how powerful her performance was and the fact that she isn't gonna win the Oscar for this role is a tragedy. The movie is engrossing right from its first act and the director tells the story of every war in our recent times by showing the most heinous war crimes committed by government forces and rebels. Despite losing her eye in the bloody Sri Lankan civil war, Mrs. Colvin never backs out and continues to work as a correspondent in the conflicts at Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq and Syria which is what the rest of the movie is about. Though I was a bit disappointed that they didn't highlight her work in Chechnya and the final days of the Sri Lankan civil war in which she exposed the massacre of over 40000 Tamil civilians committed by the Sri Lankan government. On a technical level this movie is outstanding, especially the sound mixing. Matthew Heineman focuses equally on the hellish war zones and on the rough part of her life where she was battling PTSD and alcoholism. Overall this is an outstanding tribute to journalism and tells the story of one of the best war correspondents of all time.

If you have one empathic bone in your body you can't help but feel for the people Marie Colvin wrote about and Marie herself, despite her self medication and arguably self destructive nature. Pike plays Marie as so driven by her need to tell these stories that she regularly throws her safety away and allows herself to be emotionally damaged as well. The movie builds to the extreme violence in Syria and one scene in particular that will haunt me due to the rampant and indiscriminate death rained down by government forces. While the supporting cast does a great job, Pike is amazing and should garner Oscar attention for it. This will be a difficult movie to watch but Marie's story is important because you should really know all her stories.

A very different role for Rosamund Pike then Gone Girl or any other film she has made recently. She takes the care in embodiment of Marie Colven, trying to give her truth life. This is not an easy movie to watch, harsh scenes of war-torn countries and showing real people that have actually been effected by real tragedies. While watching I definitely felt that Matthew Heineman was trying to give the realest depiction of this story. I often felt a little underwelmed with the pacing of this movie, it flips back and forth to the past and present a little too much for me and not focusing long enough on either for the full character development. Rosamund Pike did give a great performance and Marie Colvin's story is worth watching.