In the Land of Blood and Honey (2011)

Content by Tony Macklin. Originally published on March 3, 2012 @ tonymacklin.net.

It's hard to recommend a movie such as In the Land of Blood and Honey. It's more than two hours of misery and despair.

In the Land of Blood and Honey is a relentless, disturbing chronicle of cruelty. It is bleak and brutal. It relates the Serbs' attempts to exterminate the Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s.

Angelina Jolie wrote, directed, and produced this horror story to indict those international onlookers who stood by as Bosnian Serbs tried to exterminate the Muslim minority and others with mass execution and mass rape. Men, women, and children suffered bestial savagery and annihilation.

Jolie is showing this could be - and still is - happening in other parts of the world.

Most movies such as Blood and Honey might show redemption - at least partial, but traditional enmity among differing factions seems beyond redemption.

Jolie's vision of mankind does not offer any lasting respite. There are a few moments of positive humanity, but they are shattered by barbaric conflict.

The two central characters are on opposite sides of the conflict. They are Bosnian Serb Danijel (Goran Kostic - a Daniel Craig look-alike) and Muslim Ajla (Zana Marjanovic).

They care about each other, but that commitment is shaky. The world around them is deadly.

Danijel's father (Rade Serbedzija) is a powerful general. He says, "I was raised to know no difference between Serbs, Croats, and Muslims," but his wife and two of his children were slaughtered, and so merciless vengeance rules his very being, his comrades, and his country.

His son Danijel, an officer in his father's army, has a few pangs and delays of his dehumanization, but he can't resist the inevitable forces of vengeance.

The troops kill with matter-of-fact routine, and sometimes with joyful exuberance. Their native land is an assembly line of butchery and rape.

Filmed in Hungary and Bosnia-Herzegovina, In the Land of Blood and Honey has the feeling of authenticity.

Jolie's sense of human nature is dark. Dehumanization is the fate of most - both the conquerers and the conquered. Museums and art - Ajla is a painter - don't influence change. They're merely usurped.

Danijel says to Ajla, "You know people are not what they seem to be." They are worse.

Jolie has a strong view of the corruption of politics. Danijel says, "It's politics, not murder."

Ajla responds, "It's murder, even for political gain. It's murder."

In her film, In the Land of Blood and Honey, Angelina Jolie seems to be flailing against history and the nature of the human race.

Her prayer seems to be lost amidst the overwhelming nationalism, fury, and cruelty of mankind.

Damned history always repeats itself.