First of all, I want to mention that I haven't watched the movie nor will I because of personal reasons and also because it just isn't appealing enough to me. I don't know much about what happened during the Bosnian war nor the other Yugoslav wars simply because I wasn't born then yet. I've read stories and heard different interpretations of the misdeeds and atrocities that happened, as well as of the reasons why it all happened. I will conclude only one thing and that is that "it's very complicated" as one of the characters said himself. Therefore I think that Angelina Jolie, someone who comes from a country that has committed many misdeeds and was, in my opinion, very much involved in the atrocities that happened in the Balkans, had no business interpreting these events in her own way and making it into a highly publicized movie. I won't say that her interpretation is completely inaccurate, but she covered only one side of the story, while ignoring the other, deliberately or not. I personally believe that she didn't have bad intentions, she just didn't observe all the aspect and was full of prejudice and bias towards Serbian people, which is consequently creating a wrong picture in the world. It was just too much for her to take on and handle as it is such a controversial topic and it entails a great deal of responsibility. Reading the comments and the reviews of this movie made me realize that the movie had such a bad impact on interpersonal relations between people of different nationalities and religions in the Balkans, where the tension was already running high, that it made the situation significantly worse.To those who want to read about this war as I believe it happened, I recommend reading this: http://www.balkanstudies.org/articles/understanding-balkan-wars To summarize, a war is something you have to live through in order to know enough to make a movie about it and present it to the world. This specific war is particularly difficult and traumatic because of the number of innocent victims and the tragic consequences that are still appreciable. Therefore I think Angelina shouldn't have made this movie (this way) because it just reminds all the people who survived the war of the tragic events, as well as the unresolved issues and repressed feelings that are still very present. In the times when we are trying to break free from the past and make things better, this kind of reminder is not welcome.

Perhaps if this film had not been written and directed by the beautiful Angelina Jolie it would be recognized as one of the great war films. Its distinctive focus is the victimization of women in war. An end title tells us 50,000 women were raped in the Bosnian war. In the title's variation on the Promised Land, the phrase 'milk and honey' is supplanted by 'blood and honey.' That is, murder replaces sustenance, rape love, betrayal trust, and humanity is supplanted by the murderous machinery of war.One soldier tells Danijel that his pregnant wife must be delivering a son because a little daughter would drive him mad with doting. In the context his madness would have a different source: her doom to become another victim of a soldier's rape.The larger theme is the pervasiveness of division. The first shot is an aerial view of the landscape, A slash of river divides the Serbs and Bosnians. The people get along well enough to enjoy a dance together, where the Bosnian Moslem Ajla charmingly connects with the Serb soldier Danijel. Their promising romance is interrupted when a bomb shatters the club.When they next meet Ajla is a prisoner and Danijel the camp commander. That power gap inhibits both their attraction, until her humiliation drives them together. The tender eroticism of their first lovemaking derives from the refuge each finds in the other, she from the other Serb soldiers' brutality and he from the callousness of his job, personified by his father the general. Even Danijel's protection fails when he is transferred to Sarajevo. They are reunited when she, having escaped the first camp, falls in with the Bosnian underground and agrees to let herself be captured to enable her comrades to get at Danijel, now more murderous than his father. Their lovemaking turns wild from Danijel's doubting her. The division of that promising romantic couple gives way to the division within each character. Danijel is torn between his love for her and his father's hatred of the Bosnians, for what they have done to the Serbs. Ajla overcomes her emotions for Danijel to avenge the Serbs' murder of her infant nephew. So neither a passionate love nor a driven character's mission can survive the division by war.In her first scene Ajla is painting a self-portrait, in relatively naturalistic style. At the end we see her final self-portrait, a more expressionistic one in which she seems to have imposed her own splotchy image on the portrait Danijel's father ordered her to make of him, before he ordered her rape by another brute soldier. In this painting Ajla tries to expunge the general and her lover. Her ultimate portrait is what Danijel makes when his bullet to her head leaves an abstract red brushstroke against the canvas of the white wall. Bereft of all his resolve and mission he surrenders to the UN peacekeepers as a war criminal. In another form of self-portraiture Each character discovers him/herself from the tests of the war. In their night visit to the art gallery Ajla teaches Danijel that in art the most important part is the empty spaces, where the artist decides to do nothing. The war is the something the parties should not be doing. The war discovers the vacancy in both warring parties and the war's emptying of all the people's hearts, whether the respective ethnic communities or the central lovers, both together and alone.The film should not be judged as a documentary record of this war. As a fiction its thematic sweep covers a larger issue: every war's undermining of nature, humanity, and the positive sustenance of our feminine nature.

I give this movie 1 because of talentless Angelina Jolie as a director, she is also talentless as an actress, but when she look good who cares. The only movies she shined in were disturbing movies. I also though it was a waste of time as Angelina seemed still very confused as to which direction to take the movie in. Even if it was biased I would have much preferred if someone like Steven Spielberg directed this kind of a big chunk of. movie, because he has a knack for reeling in watchers into a movie even some with ridiculous story lines. I also felt hat the movie lacked empathy and real emotions instead it was filled with disgusting scenes and crap over dramatic effects.

The story was sequenced without actual lead. No reality was involved, in one scene Aila was brutally raped in next she looks happy and having sex with her loving man etc. There are traces of true but whole story of Bosnian war was completely simplified. This looks like a bad copy of Emir Kusturica movie "Life is a miracle" 2004. Angelina Jolly should look this movie and she wouldn't probably never made this film. At the end it looks like somebody ordered cheap story for daily use. Pity! On the other hands actors did professional job. Scenes and environment are very realistic and authentic. Music is somehow out of story. I think that scenario had potential but with lot of changes and adjustment.