Respond to these rapid questions in our The Water Diviner quiz and we will tell you which The Water Diviner character you are. Play it now.
The Water Diviner,” Russell Crowe’s debut film as a filmmaker, is an internally conflicted look at a man’s search for three kids who vanished at the Gallipoli campaign in Turkey 100 years ago. It aspires to be both a somber and doubtful antiwar film and an exhilarating adventure with splotches of romantic humor, buddy comedy, and borderline swashbuckling. Crowe, who also plays the role of widowed hero Joshua Connor, is a fantastic action star and does a great job of portraying a man from the 19th century or our idealized version of a man from that era. However, a character like Connor isn’t the right choice for this kind of movie since Crowe’s evident charisma, which the director confidently displays, works against the movie’s other purpose, which is to cast doubt on and examine he-man myths.
When the hero says, “I did fill their heads with heroic nonsense: God, King, and Country,” it is an astonishingly brave admission coming from a man whose wife Eliza (Jacqueline McKenzie) committed suicide because she couldn’t handle the loss of three boys. However, like other such moments, this one falls flat because “The Water Diviner” is filled with the same “heroic nonsense” that Connor decries. When we see “The Water Diviner,” we are challenged to break our dependence on the visual that the movie just can’t resist. Every time Andrew Knight and Andrew Anastasios’ screenplay cautions its characters and the audience against accepting the idea that war is a test of fortitude—an activity that transforms boys into men and shrouds them in glory whether they survive or not—it is followed by a scene in which Connor digs a well by himself, fights with four Turks in an alley, eludes would-be captors by climbing across rooftops, gallops into the movie’s climax
The movie’s hazy supernatural undertones are also annoying. They seem to be more in line with cherished childhood recollections of “Star Wars” than with 19th century depictions of Christian or Muslim mysticism. By closing his eyes and allowing The Force to flow through him, Connor discovers answers in Turkey the same way he did in the Australian outback back home. He also frequently experiences lengthy, minute-by-minute flashbacks to past events that only God could reveal in such detail. This seems more like a storytelling gimmick than a popular depiction of humanity’s interconnectedness (of the kind that Crowe’s native Peter Weir accomplished in so many outstanding movies, including “Gallipoli” and the Crowe vehicle “Master and Commander”).
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The movie’s understanding of politics and history is also hazy. The fact that “The Water Diviner” is being released internationally exactly one hundred years after the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps landed at Gallipoli and joined a bloody campaign that lasted from April 1915 to January 1916 would be less concerning if it had been released five or ten years earlier and at a different time of year. When you consider how “The Water Diviner” uses the specific atrocities of this World War I chapter as a background for a story of a dejected white Australian finding himself in a foreign place, this seems like one of the worst strategic blunders in movie release ever. He encounters a rules-obsessed British commander (Dan Wyllie) who tries to keep him off the battlefield, has a revitalizing (albeit chaste) affair with a widowed Turkish woman half his age (Olga Kurylenko’s Ayshe), and steps in as Orhan’s adoptive father (Dylan Georgiades).
The Water Diviner Quiz
In total, during the Gallipoli war, 205,000 British, 47,000 French, and 251,000 Turkish men perished in battle or from sickness; around 8,700 of Britain’s fatalities came from ANZAC forces. There is no mention of the Armenian genocide, which got underway the same day the ANZAC soldiers arrived. All of this, with its echoes of “Dances with Wolves” via “The Quiet Man,” should serve mostly as background to a brawny man’s heroic healing journey, which makes the concluding devotion to the dead sound tone-deaf.
Also, you will find out which character are you in this The Water Diviner quiz.
Flashbacks to the ordeal of Connor’s sons (Ryan Corr, Ben O’Toole, and James Fraser), which are marked by blood, sobs, and groans, as well as scenes of ANZAC and Turkish soldiers being raked by machine gun fire, gutted with bayonets, and pulped by land mines and artillery, give the movie a suitably incredulous horror. But “The Water Diviner” also feels conflicted in this situation. Crowe’s staging of violence swings between coldly observing unspeakable agony and marveling over the harm that guns may do to human flesh in a video game. The fight between “War is terrible” and “War is awesome” takes precedence over the other wars that are depicted in the film, which include East vs. West, the Ottoman Empire vs. the British Empire, and the Greeks vs. the Turks. There is no winner in this conflict. It ought to have been a no-brainer.
For more personality quizzes check this: Prem Ratan Dhan Payo Quiz.
