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Title: Oliver Stone's first signs of brilliance
Review: Finally got around to seeing this and was very impressed. The story is compelling, the performances are excellent, and the score is haunting, but ultimately it is Stone's tight, effective screenplay that makes this movie work so well. No, it does not give a very favorable impression of the Turkish people, but given the circumstances of the prisons there at this time, it is probably realistic. The "pigs" courtroom speech is absolutely true to how Hayes would have felt at that point. A perceptive viewer would understand the context of his speech and assume that in reality not all Turks are pigs. Context is everything. Ultimately, though, that doesn't have much to do with the point of the movie. It documents in painstaking detail the brutality and the suffering this young man went through.
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