Can anyone explain this to me?
We see the camp being liberated and Eric returning home to visit his mother, who asks him to tell her everything that happened. Yet later he says that his mother had died during the war. Was the homecoming scene part of a hallucination. dream, or some such thing?
He was hallucinating, totally unnecessary addition IMO. UK release does NOT have this sequence at all. Apparently, Weinstein made a few editing changes to the US release, mostly for the worse I'd say.
They also took out a scene between Kidman and SS about whether Firth should be given the info of his torturer. The film would have been better if the scene was left untouched.
Anyway, what I noticed about US release is they added a few more Irvine scenes, a decision I don't understand, he's good but not that good. In fact, I find him rather weak in the whole water boarding sequence, especially when he was making "confession" to his torturers.
I was confused by this too at first, but it's clear his mother is an hallucination when she starts to ask him questions identical to those that Nagase had previously asked him ("why did you build the radio?" etc. details that his mother could not have possibly known about). And in the next scene we see he is about to be tortured again. The brain tends to dissociate from reality in these kinds of situations leading to hallucinatory experiences. Another clue that this scene is not real is that Lomax in the cage open his eyes to see (or perhaps dream) Allied troops landing in the POW camp and hugs his best friend on the truck. This part has an ethereal quality about it.
Spoilers!Spoilers!Spoilers!Spoilers!