Louis Zamperini suffered many hardships in his life, including training endlessly for the 1936 Olympics, becoming cast away at sea on a raft for 47 days, and being held as a prisoner of war by the Japanese. His wartime experiences were originally documented in the book written by Laura Hillenbrand, and recently recreated on film by director Angelina Jolie in “Unbroken.”

The movie stops at Chapter 33 of the book, when Zamperini is finally reunited with his family after being starved, tortured and nearly worked to death for two years in a Japanese POW camp. The movie ends just where his life really begins. In Chapter 34, Zamperini returns to the U.S. mainland, where he is left to face his demons.

For the first four years after his return, Zamperini’s actions reflected his anger toward God. He devised plans to go to Japan and murder Mutsuhiro “The Bird” Watanabe, one of the officers who tortured him. He experienced war flashbacks, nearly destroyed his marriage and quickly became an alcoholic. During these years, Zamperini’s life was consumed with the idea of revenge. Not only had the war been hell to live through, but his experience at war was disrupting his freedom back in America. In the book, he described coming home as “an experience of profound, perilous aloneness.”

The title shared by the book and movie begs the biggest question of it all. How did Louie Zamperini remain “unbroken” after everything that he had been through overseas and was experiencing back home in America? His transformation from a hateful heart to a forgiving friend occurred by the grace of God. He was saved one night in downtown Los Angeles, but the movie doesn’t tell you that.

Jolie generalizes his religious experience at the end of the movie and writes, “Motivated by faith, Louie came to see that the way forward was not revenge, but forgiveness.”

Speculators and critics have argued that because of Jolie’s lack of spiritual belief, Zamperini’s relationship with God was overshadowed by what would break box-office records, scenes of his experiences at sea and as a POW.

“For us, the movie is all about the theme of light and darkness — it’s both a metaphor and it’s practical,” Jolie said in an interview with The Los Angeles Times. “When Lou is in the camps, it’s dark, and when he comes up, it’s light. And that’s what we are trying to depict.”

However, Zamperini, along with many other men, still experienced darkness when returning home from such circumstances.

“For these men, the central struggle of post-war life was to restore their dignity and find a way to see the world as something other than menacing blackness,” wrote Hillenbrand. “There was no one, right way to peace; every man had to find his own path, according to his own history. Some succeeded. For others, the war would never really end.”

Zamperini’s war ended when he came to hear Southern Baptist preacher Billy Graham speak of God. He was fuming by the end of Graham’s sermon, which claimed that people were not good enough by themselves, and needed a savior.

He started to storm out of the service when he encountered his last war flashback. One moment he was about to walk away from Graham’s message, and the next, he was on the raft again, looking up to the sky and begging God, “If you save me I will serve you.” And that was it. The troubled veteran was not only saved, he was “unbroken.”

The peace that Zamperini battled to find did not come from freedom as an American citizen. Peace came the moment he accepted and acknowledged that he needed a savior.

“He found a spot under a tree, sat down, and began reading,” wrote Hillenbrand. “Resting in the shade and the stillness, Louis felt profound peace. When he thought of his history, what resonated with him now was not all that he had suffered but the divine love that he believed had intervened to save him. He was not the worthless, broken, forsaken man that the Bird had striven to make of him.”

Zamperini, who passed away months before the film’s release, spent the rest of his life furthering God’s kingdom, yet people walked out of the theater not even knowing that he was a Christian, but just that he was a man of faith.

He was a great man not for what he endured, but for how he endured it. He was only able to go back to Japan and embrace his former captors because he felt that God had done the same thing for him through dying on the cross. Zamperini’s story was amazing because even after everything he had been through, he forgave because God’s love made him whole again.

The book explains how and why Zamperini was “unbroken” after everything he endured. If only the movie would have stuck to the message of the book, then perhaps more people would have been able to experience the peace that he did.