Reviews

Fantastic!

It's February, 1945. American forces are sweeping across the Pacific, retaking one island after another. They've landed in the Philippines in force. Japanese troops on Leyte Island are sick, starving, and cut off, with little hope of rescue or resupply.

Desertion, depravity, desperation, and paranoia ensue. But it's not quite as bleak as it sounds. There is morbid fascination, pathos, and gallows humor to be had in watching these abandoned soldiers slowly waste away in the Philippine jungle. It's grim yet somehow eminently watchable, a testament to the skill of director Kon Ichikawa, who also made the magnificent film The Burmese Harp (1956).

In the closing phase of the Second World War, Imperial Japan inserts numerous specially trained soldiers throughout the Pacific islands whose secret mission is to survive at all costs and wage an unending campaign of guerrilla warfare. This film depicts the three-decade campaign of postwar "resistance" waged on Lubang Island, Philippines by Hiroo Onoda, the very last of the infamous Japanese "holdouts" who refused to accept the war had ended, against all reason and repeated attempts to make contact.

As a film, it's great - it's dramatic and engaging, with great writing, direction, and acting. But the deeper social reality is quite disturbing. Onoda and others like him are revered by many in Japan as exemplars of grit, determination, and steadfast dedication to duty, rather than as exemplars of the kind of rigid fanaticism and pathological obedience that made a continent's worth of war crimes possible.

Neapolitans fight back against the Germans in this fantastic cinema verite film about the civilian uprising in Naples. The raw, unpolished (by Hollywood standards) cinematography lends it a documentary realism. The long-take, wide-angle shots of real locations in Naples, and scenes employing complex staging involving dozens or hundreds of people are awesome to watch. They give a real sense of the geography and rhythm of urban battle, a rock solid sense of time and place, like the action is happening for real and that you're actually there. Which is so different from the modern trend of hyperkinetic shakycam closeups that convey "chaotic busy-ness" while providing absolutely no sense of time, place, relative geography, or physical context.

Viewing recommendation: This film makes a great double feature with Everybody Go Home! (1960) aka Tutti a Casa, made two years earlier. The plot of that film takes you from the September 8, 1943 Armistice right up to the Naples uprising at the end of September.

This film depicts the capture and execution of Benito Mussolini, just two days before Adolf Hitler's own suicide. It's a pitiful, pathetic end for the once strutting fascist dictator. You almost - *almost* - feel sorry for him.

Il Duce is fought over, passed around, abandoned, and captured as multiple factions pursue conflicting agendas. The Nazis want to get him out of Italy. The regular German army wants to be rid of him. A few loyal fascists want to continue fighting, but most of them abandon him. Some partisans want to put him on trial while others want to execute him immediately. And the Americans want him handed over to them "for prestige". As cinema goes, this is not exactly Oscar-winning material but the story itself is fascinating, and the historical value helps make this obscure film worth viewing.

This is an exhaustive (and exhausting) account of events surrounding the Battle of Okinawa, beginning with pre-invasion defense preparations (starting in July 1944), then moving to the aerial bombardment, to the US invasion, and finally to ground combat. In its desire to be "complete" and thoroughly document the battle (from the Japanese POV, of course), it shortchanges story and characters. It feels like three hundred mini-vignettes rapidly spat out by a machine gun rather than a smoothly flowing, cohesive whole.

As for historical context and accuracy, others have already pointed out their reservations about the Japanese being framed as noble, even heroic, warriors fighting the good fight against overwhelming odds. This complaint about its narrative framing also applies to virtually every Japanese film about World War II. In the collective cinematic imagination of Japanese WWII films, the "war" is treated almost as a cosmic, non-human, event that simply happens TO them. Unlike in many German films where characters ponder "will the world forgive us?" or "now our chickens are coming home to roost. We will now reap what we have sown", in Japanese films, it is almost always "oh poor us. We are losing. It's so sad. Why must we lose? What about our honor? What about our children?"

The movie itself is great and I have nothing to add that hasn't already been said by thousands of others. My "review" is entirely about the time period in which the story takes place. This is a ridiculously long explanation for such a seemingly inconsequential subject, but it somehow feels appropriate for a Tarantino film, where brevity is a sin.

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If you google "When does Inglourious Basterds take place?" all the search results will tell you "June 1944, after the D-Day landings but before the liberation of Paris". I assume this conclusion is based largely on the hint that the Basterds were parachuting in ahead of the Allied armada and by the end were to drive over to Allied lines - meaning drop in before D-Day, complete the mission, then drive over to Normandy after the Allied landing. Sounds nice but it's simply wrong, and contradicted by all the evidence within the film.

1) Michael Fassbender at one point mentions not being able to see any films produced in Germany for the past 3 years, obviously implying an embargo due to the war. This places the story in the latter part of 1942.

2) An even more precise clue is the giant wall map at Nazi HQ during the Hitler scene. It shows the maximum extent of German conquest (achieved by late August 1942). If you know your WW II geography, you'll notice they've reached all the way to Stalingrad and the Caucuses, and still control all of North Africa except for British-controlled Egypt. You may even have noticed that the Vichy Free Zone still exists as a distinct entity, prior to it being fully absorbed.

In November 1942, four things happen: a) a masssive Soviet counteroffensive encircles the German army around Stalingrad b) the British army in Egypt defeats Rommel's Afrika Korps at El Alamein and drives them west across Libya.

C) Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of Morocco & Algeria happens. (The "Armada" that Brad Pitt mentions is 1942's Operation Torch, not 1944's Operation Overlord) d) in response to French forces in North Africa switching sides and joining the Allies, Nazis take over the remainder of France, effectively ending the Vichy state.

The wall map makes sense ONLY from about late August to early November 1942. A June 1944 map looks RADICALLY different from this.

3) The bit about driving to Allied lines isn't about getting to the Normandy beachhead and instead is almost certainly referring to crossing over from Nazi-controlled France into the Vichy-controlled "Free Zone".

4) The story also works much better in 1942. The Nazis you see on screen are oozing with egotistical hubris, perfect for 1942, at the height of their power, but completely misplaced in 1944, by which time they'd become jittery paranoid basket cases.

5) Italy's king and Grand Fascist Council had ousted Mussolini from power in July 1943 and the new Badoglio government surrendered to the Allies in September. By summer 1944, Germany was treating Italy as just another vassal state with a puppet regime, and shipping Italians back to the Third Reich for slave labor. Random Italians would not have been invited to an exclusive Nazi gathering, much less greeted as welcome allies, in summer 1944. In 1942 yes.

Conclusion: You should never blindly accept what you read on the internet.

Allied prisoners of war are treated to the brutality and barbarity of the Japanese Bushido code of "honor" and the prisoners say "Please sir, can I have some more?"

This film takes an appallingly pacifist perspective. The men who resist and try to fight back are presented as selfish villains and the ones who acquiesce to their captivity, and accommodate their captors are presented as the heroes. The message of this film appears to be: "if someone treats you as a slave, endeavor to be an even BETTER slave than your oppressor thought possible." This isn't even pacifism. It is abject servility. It is appalling to see it so valorized.

It must be pointed out to the pathologically pacifist among us that their extreme pacifism is a LUXURY purchased by those who actually do the fighting. And the film tries to present an ending that evokes a sense of "We survived the war because we were good little slaves, unlike those who fought back and were killed for their troubles." But the war only ended because other people fought and died and MADE the war end. It didn't happen by magic. The men in the POW camp in this story would have remained prisoners for many more years, perhaps decades. If all soldiers had adopted the attitude of the people in this film, the whole world today would be speaking Japanese and German.

It's a great film, but it's most definitely not for everyone.

It employes a highly unusual structure. It's told mostly through a series of live tableaus, various moments "frozen" in place, accompanied by a woman's letters read out in voiceover narration, as the camera weaves in and out of the scene, gliding past characters posed in freeze frame postures. At times, it feels more like performance art or a museum exhibition, and it easily could have been a cheap gimmick. But the filmmakers have performed a near miracle and instead of a cheap gimmick, they've produced something genuinely moving. It is haunting and heartbreaking. The film does demand some patience, but that patience is rewarded.

Here's some historical context:

In June 1940, while the Western European powers are preoccupied with the catastrophe of Dunkirk and the collapse of France, the Soviet Union swiftly and quietly occupies the three Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. A year later, beginning on June 14, 1941, Soviet forces carry out mass deportations of people from throughout the Baltic region to their new lives as prisoners/serfs/slaves in Siberia. This was just one part of Stalin's systematic dismantling of local/indigenous sources of power, authority, and legitimacy in every territory Moscow controlled. It is also a small part of the decades-long program of ethnic cleansing and "Russification" of Soviet-conquered and Soviet-occupied lands. The euphemism they used was "population transfers".

We used to have stories where our protagonists had to overcome obstacles thrown their way by life, random circumstances, people working at cross purposes, or by direct action of antagonists. These days, the obstacles are increasingly created by our characters being incredibly, unbelievably, skull-crushingly STUPID, OBLIVIOUS, RECKLESS, and SELFISH. And because they're written that way, and the script needs them to be that way to move the plot forward, all the other characters around our stupid lead characters just accept it and never once yell "WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU???"

Princess Margaret is a cartoonishly stupid and oblivious woman acting like a 4 year old, constantly running around from one place to the next, without ever having the decency to say to her compatriots "hey, let's wait 30 SECONDS for my sister to catch up, that way she won't have to spend the ENTIRE NIGHT looking for me. Look, she's *RIGHT* there. Just wait 30 seconds." No of course not. Wooosh! Off she goes to the next place, with nary a care. The insultingly lazy script requires that Margaret has the IQ of a toaster.

Elizabeth isn't much better. She scolds the young soldier who paid for her bus fare and helped her get cleaned up because she doesn't like his opinion on the king. "HOW DARE YOU!" And after he gets physically thrown to the pavement by others, tells him he got what he deserved, but then keeps following him, ruins his chances with his newfound dates, and treats him like a servant. Because she has to, because that's how she's written. The script requires her to have the empathy of a frying pan.

And because she needs to be this insufferable to move the plot forward, he just stands there and takes the abuse because otherwise there would be no movie. The script requires him to have the spine of a jellyfish. And then there are those two godawful pathetic, completely un-funny chaperones.

The people who made this movie either think we viewers are morons or they actively despise their audience and want to punish us.

None of the characters are believable. In fact, most of them suffer from an increasingly common movie disease - they behave like entitled, petulant, morally self-rigteous people from the 21st century, who openly show their contempt for people in authority instead of people living in the 1940s under Nazi occupation, and fearing for their lives. This increasingly common type of movie character is designed for ignorant viewers to identity with and say to themselves "oh yeah, give it to 'em! Tell them off! Yeah that's what I would have done if faced with Nazis!" No, that is fantasy. People behaving like that would have long ago been sent to prison or a concentration camp or shot dead in the street. I'm tired of waching supposedly historical period films where the people dress like the time period but talk and behave like they're in the 2020s.

Infuriating characters being selfish, reckless pr*cks in an aggravatingly stupid movie.

One of the most insufferable things in life is a selfish, reckless jackass that messes with other people because he/she is bored or "just to see what happens". I despise these kinds of people in real life with a burning passion and I get absolutely zero entertainment watching them on screen. I hate this movie.

Apparently, my review is too short, so here's some more text. This movie sucks. It is a steaming pile of horse manure. I hate people who treat other human beings like their personal lab rat for them to experiment on.

I'm not sure what movie some of these other reviewers watched, but the one I saw was filled with Irritating entitled brats, and an overbearing school marm from hell. I gave it two stars because I stopped watching in the middle. I wasn't willing to risk further aggravation just to satisfy a morbid curiosity about whether the remainder of the movie would justify lowering my score all the way to one star.

It's a product of its time. Who knows, perhaps I too would have enjoyed this if I'd seen it a few decades ago. That was a different era, when men and women were more generous with each other. But alas, we live in the Uber Woke 21st Century where every self-appointed moral guardian gets to play the School Marm from Hell. The character on display here used to be a MOVIE CHARACTER, and the humor obviously would have been how UNREASONABLE such behavior is.

But today, we actually live with people like this. They're in our actual lives everywhere - at school, work, in government, hell even our goddamn millionaire athletes and entertainers lecture us on how terrible we are and how WE (not THEY) need to "do better". There is no humor or entertainment to be had from spending our free time watching fictional finger-waggers do on screen what real-world finger-waggers do to us every day in real life. No thanks.

A languid story of hardscrabble life in an undefined, pre-industrial time and an undefined, windswept location takes a radical, tire-shredding left turn in the last 25 minutes to transform, Chestburster-like, into a World War II, anti-Japanese Resistance movie. I have no problems with surprising plot developments, tonal shifts, or the mixing of genres, but What. The. Hell.

You can almost hear the Chinese Communist Party's Minister for Culture and Propaganda yelling at the director "WTF are you doing with this story about wine peasants in the outback??? Make me something anti-imperialist!!! Make me something about glorious Communist resistance fighters!! What are we paying you for??? Do we need to send you to a re-education camp AGAIN???"

Having said that, the film has lovely locations, gorgeous cinematography, and a refreshing pace, especially compared to the frenetic, wall-to-wall noise of current Chinese cinema. It was an impressive first film for director Zhang Yimou and star Gong Li.

But still, that Left Turn... Oof.

I'm not sure how much of the blame should fall on the subtitles. You can never tell how good the translation is. Each sentence on its own was grammatically correct, but put together, the film's dialogue made no sense.

Was there even a story here? What little story there seemed to be kept getting interrupted for random tangents or philosophical musings nobody asked for. And the characters were all over the place. Stone faced one minute, laughing the next, can't give you the time of day, then suddenly passionately in love. None of it made any sense. Maybe it just all got lost in translation. And that death scene. Oh my god, just die already.

I've seen some of the director's other work (Kanal was fantastic, and Katyn was brooding and somber), so my reaction isn't due to an unfamiliarity with his style. But this film was just terrible. So unbelievably boring. I have no idea what film the other reviewers saw, and everyone's entitled to his/her opinion, but those people must have been smoking some damn good stuff.

It was impossible to keep track of who's doing what, who's going, who's staying. After a while, I didn't care.

If I think of something else worth saying, I'll edit this later. Hopefully, this meets the required minimum of text.

The good: Real Paris locations, beautiful natural-light cinematography, wide angle shots and rooftop vistas that make you feel like you're there.

The bad: The mediocre acting, the ludicrous dialogue, the atrocious English dubbing (as far as I can tell, the dubbed version is the ONLY version that exists), the jangly wonky soundtrack.

This historic event deserved to be immortalized in a fantastic cinematic recreation. We got this instead. Oh well.

I know what the filmmakers probably intended - the horrors and pain of war as seen through a child's eyes (and many of the reviewers also read it this way). But in my eyes, what they actually created was a new variation on the age-old story of a boy who wrecks his life and his family to please and impress a selfish, entitled girl who is never satisfied. Boy meets girl. Girl makes demands. Boy wrecks life.

She cares more about her dead dog than her dead parents. And when she's adopted into a poor rural family (they comment on how clean she is and that she smells like perfume, while they themselves are dressed in rags), her presence starts to cause major problems for the family.

Given the high average score, and the critical acclaim this film has received, opinion is obviously varied, and mine will be in the minority.

The reason I don't give this 1 star is because there were other, non-story-related elements I found enjoyable or at least interesting: the cinematography, the landscape, the seeming authenticity of 1940s rural French poverty, complete with the peasant family having flies on their faces during the kitchen scenes.

It takes real skill to make such an inherently dramatic story so damn boring and utterly drained of all interest and vitality.

The amazing shooting location, the vintage fighter planes, the explosions, the hundreds or thousands of background extras... all wasted on a film with no story. In place of a story, they give us a random string of random encounters between random people who talk and talk, and then talk some more about nothing. They walk and talk. They sit and talk. They smoke and talk. They drink and talk. And then some bombs go off, or some Messerschmitts fly low and strafe the soldiers. And then we're back to pointless talking. This is not a film. It's two hours of footage.

And it's unfortunately characteristic of a particular kind of French film (especially a 1960s French film) where we get a cast of automatons who don't at all resemble real human characters but go around engaging in inane chit chat or robotically spouting meaningless philosophical musings or dialectics. It's so 60s. It's so French.

This film is for me like 'Requiem for a Dream' - meaning a film that's brilliantly crafted but so absolutely relentless that it is actually exhausting to watch. I can appreciate it on an intellectual level but as a movie watching experience, it was not at all entertaining, fun, or pleasant, and I will probably never watch it again.

Imagine the King Leonidas meme screaming in your face:

WAR!

IS!

NUANCED!!@!!!!

Followed by subtlety & believability getting kicked screaming into a bottomless pit in glorious slow-mo.

This film is supposedly tackling a sacred cow of Polish war history (and national mythology), namely the heroic defense of Westerplatte against all odds. In doing so, it asks us to scratch beneath the surface of the heroic warrior narrative and see the reality of that event, in all its complexity and nuance and human frailty, warts and all. Unfortunately, it's a bit hard to appreciate this nuance when the film spends two hours beating our skulls with a sledgehammer and screaming in our faces about how complex and subtle the real situation was.

The characters seem to have two emotional settings: zero and ten; catatonic and hysterical, stoic and screaming. This is not subtlety or nuance. It's binary, and it rings false. The performances are soap opera melodramatic, with lots of Drama School overacting. The old 1967 version is so much better in every respect.

How can the Number 1 & 2 ranking officers spend several days issuing contradictory orders and directly undermining each other without the entire thing falling to pieces? That's absurd. Either the commanding officer would lock up the second-in-command for direct insubordination (and perhaps treason) and get on with business, or that guy would go through whatever military procedure is available to relieve his commander of duty, and then take corrective steps to right the sinking ship. You can't spend several days in the middle of combat with the top dog issuing orders and his underling simply saying "no" again and again. This is absurd.

This film is best thought of as an anthology of short stories, rather than a single film with a cohesive plot that takes you from beginning to end. Because there is no plot here, unless you consider "World War Two: North Africa and Europe" to be a plot.

The lack of plot coupled with a hyper-focus on this one particular squad to the exclusion of almost everything else (including any Big Picture context) gives it the feel of a disjointed, floating dream. We tumble chronologically through the war in a series of self-contained vignettes that are at times riveting, surprising, confusing, moving, hokey, poignant, and which somehow build up a cumulative emotional weight I wasn't expecting.

Is it the best WWII film ever made? No.

Is it the most exciting/entertaining? No.

Is it the most dramatic/emotional/gut-wrenching? No.

But it is a worthwhile choice for when you're in the mood for something slightly different, something more like an impressionist painting or an ambient soundscape.

This could easily have been 9 stars. It gets knocked down to a 6 because it's just Way. Too. Repetitive.

The long beginning is fine. It nicely sets up the world and the characters. The ending is also fine - there's a clear story progression with some nice buildups, tensions, problem-solving, and resolution. The problem is the excruciatingly long middle section where you're essentially watching the SAME DAMN SCENE over & over again for about 2 hours. Yes, it was an excellent, tense, nail-biting scene... the first time. Even the second time. But it kept repeating. Again. And Again.

I'm always reminded of the dictum that there's a big difference between PORTRAYING boredom and BEING boring. In the same spirit, there's a difference between portraying the oppressive monotony of constant danger, and simply being oppressively monotonous.

Storytelling and Real Life are two very different things and they follow very different rules. In storytelling, if you're gonna repeat something 5, 6, 7 times, you'd better have a real good reason for it. Being "realistic" does not, by itself, make a good film. Real Life is often excruciatingly repetitive and boring and seemingly pointless. Cinema should not be.

This is a great movie. It's tense, action-packed, and highly entertaining. That's what I want out of this kind of movie. It's not meant to be a documentary. It's not a dramatization of a *particular* mission or incident. The historical context may be true but the story itself is a work of FICTION, just like the central plot of Saving Private Ryan is fiction.

And yet lots of people have given ridiculously low scores because "that's not how it happened" or they object that it "gives credit to Americans for British accomplishments", even though the text at the end of the film clearly credits both British and American captures of U-boats & enigma machines. At least they're honest about why they're unfairly downvoting it.

The film masquerades as a village crime mystery, and takes far too long to instead reveal itself as a philosophical musing on... something. What that something is isn't entirely clear, but the film clearly wants the viewer to understand certain things - about history and tradition, about pilgrimages and miracles, about an idyllic countryside, about having the strength to persevere and hope for a better tomorrow. There are individual moments of beauty, reverie, and contemplation that can be appreciated on their own terms, but there's not much of a story here, with the main "plot" turning out to be largely irrelevant.