Nikudan

It's a shame this movie can't be found on home video. See it if you get a chance. It was distributed in the U.S. under the name "The Human Bullet," and tells the story of a Japanese soldier in WWII who eventually finds himself launched on a kamakazi mission against a U.S. ship.

The free spirit of 1968 is very much evident in the film as, for example, our hero's blathering superiors are compared to an endlessly skipping vinyl LP. A funny savaging of the dehumanization of wartime and the military in general.

Okamoto is a director that seems to get very little exposure outside of his most famous work Sword of Doom. Few know his equally bleak and gorgeous Samurai Assassin and I've yet to encounter anyone who has seen Human Bullet which is a shame, because it is an incredibly unique piece of war satire.

The movie which takes place in the final days of world war 2 is centred on a gangly little guy trying to make his way through the war in search of sex, a glorious death or at least some rest, which luckily for him eventually earns him a post manning a torpedo in the middle of nowhere in wait for any american ships to pass by. This wrap-around story is complemented by scenes of his previous experiences in the absurd mechanism that is the military. There's a very dark humorous edge here you don't find that often outside of Catch22. I think many anti-war movies make the mistake of showing war as constant horrific violence to get across its destructive nature, yet when you read memoirs of soldiers from the world wars their description sounds more like long stretches of mind-numbing boredom interspersed with sudden bursts of unbelievable trauma followed by a terrible silence, and their life through all of this is being controlled and held together by an apparatus that doesn't really knows what it's doing and just follows rules that were written by people who clearly didn't have bullets whizzing around them all day. There's always a dispassionate bureaucratic edge to war and the commitment of its atrocities that to me is truly more frightening than anything else. Human Bullet gets this absurd juxtaposition down extremely well.

I can imagine many of the strange situations in this film might be based on Okamoto's own life. He was in the precise age range that got used as cannon fodder by the thousands in order to stave off the inevitable defeat of imperial Japan. There's often a bleakness and grimness to many other directors from that generation especially people like Kinji Fukasaku. Yet Human Bullet never loses its humour despite the morose nature of its narrative and thus feels a lot more like its contemporary Japanese nouvelle vague films whose directors tended to be a bit younger and inspired by 60s counter culture. This is underlined by a nice little narrative bow to 1960s Japan and its careless youth. At times Human Bullet is downright cute and plays more like a live action manga than anything else. It's incredibly dense with subtle humour and commentary and thus warrants repeat viewings. After Samurai Assassin and this one I definitely feel compelled to do a deeper dive into Okamoto's filmography.

In the days after the events in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a Japanese soldier in the closing days of WWII becomes assigned to a suicide squad training for the Final Fight, the desperate plan and huge manslaughter prepared by unyielding Japanese generals against an Allied land invasion of Japan. You'd be forgiven for thinking this is a grim-as-can-be downbeat war movie in the vein of FIRES IN THE PLAIN. Kihachi Okamoto may be most well known in the West for his SWORD OF DOOM, one of the darkest most nihilistic chambaras in movie history, but that's more of an exception than a rule in Okamoto's oeuvre. A streak of bleak dark humor and biting satire runs through his work, not always in subtle ways but never done without a certain taste and affection for the absurd and the tragic, and The Human Bullet is no exception. When it veers close to anti-war sermonizing ("when kids hold grenades it's hopeless, you should be getting an education") it grates with the rough edge of too much explicitness and not enough subtext, but it becomes an exhilarating movie when it's allowed room to breathe and play around in its own comedic absurdism without taking itself too serious as a satire that must hammer home some political point. When it's allowed the sheer pleasure of painting surreal images like that of a man in a bucket strapped next to a torpedo (see screenshot above) or a foxhole buried in a sand hill in the middle of nowhere and affords for itself the narrative freedom of no concrete urgent plot to drive forward but instead the loose interconnectivity of a vignette structure, a series of encounters between the Japanese soldier and a motley crew of bizarre characters as he trains himself for the coming Final Fight, these perhaps giving the film a slight handicap of repetitiveness because the film's point is made with enough clarity in the opening scenes where the starving soldier caught stealing food from the army's granaries is forced by his sergeant to go around naked to show everyone he's a pig, but it remains a pleasant breezy watch.

This is a low-budget movie (when a plane attacks the soldier in the torpedo we only see the ripple of its fire and most of the movie is shot outdoors with a small cast) with a raw unpolished edge, lots of hand-held shots and experimental non-narrative cutting that in a way places The Human Bullet in the outer perimeters of the Japanese New Wave map (although Okamoto was and would continue to be a studio filmmaker working for Toho first and foremost). In its combination of fierce antiwar satire, bleak humor, sardonic wit, and irreverent attitude, reminiscent of DR. STRANGELOVE, yet with a more homemade feel than Kubrick would ever allow for one of his movies, The Human Bullet is one of those cult movies in search for an audience. Like most cult movies it's not perfect or ever truly aspires to that kind of formally accomplished film-making, but it makes sense in a "let's get on with it" level. This is the kind of movie that doesn't allow realism to distract it too much from its overarching aesthetic, a movie that doesn't allow its viewer to be concerned with the fact that a man holed up in a bucket in the middle of a sea can survive ten days without water and remain freshly shaven because more outrageous images are soon to follow.

One of the best anti-war movies ever, really thought provoking. Terada's performance is terrific and Nakadai Tatsuya is a wonderful narrator.

There are truly heartbreaking moments but it's full of humour too, a very special kind of humour. The style being obviously very different, I wouldn't hesitate to compare this movie to Kobayashi's trilogy or to Ichikawa's Burmese Harp. Made me think about Masumura's Red Angel too. Great movie.

It should be better known and shown all over the world but I doubt it would change much as many people are idiots indeed. You'll understand if you watch it ;-)