Philosophy of a Knife

I love Andrey Iskanov's other works such as Nails and Visions of Suffering and find Philosophy of a Knife along the same lines. While yes this movie is disturbing, graphic and based on real events I am amazed at the backlash the movie and Andrey have gotten.

Unlike other reviewers I knew what this movie was about going in. Yes there was a documentary aspect to it, part documentary and some historical footage which I thought helped connect the film as a whole, ramming it home even more that this was based on a true story. I am not sure what kind of movie others were expecting. Maybe they did not listen to the beginning interview or have not heard about Unit 731 before, or even seen Andrey's other works. I find the attack on actors and special effects ludicrous. How do you expect people to act in this scenario? Most of the special effects were very good in my opinion. There were some that could have been done better but that is the way it is and to me has no relevance to the movie as a whole. This movie was made in a certain style and is not your Hollywood pumped out generic horror crap or cookie cutter work. One reviewer even said it was a horrible movie because the actress had a Brazilian which apparently the character would not have at the time. Out of everything that is going on in that movie, the pain, cruelty, and deadening of humanity he focuses on that... I would go ahead and watch and listen to the quick interview at the beginning of the movie which answers all the questions other posters are missing. Yes it's not for everyone and for me its even hard to say I enjoyed it because it was very disturbing. My rant is over...

The small portions of this movie that have any merit, mostly the archival footage which is in some cases quite well applied, are over shadowed by a number of glaring flaws. The narrator blatantly overlooks other widespread abuses and atrocities committed by the whole of the Japanese military, instead claiming that any injustices were simply in response to pressures from the conflict with Russia. To try and whitewash Unit 731's role as a defencive measure is historically inaccurate, and since the Philosophy of a Knife claims to be a sober look at historical events, it fails on that level. I would say while there are few other movies that focus primarily on Imperial Japan's forays into chemical and biological warfare, this one does not ear points for filling a niche void.

Philosophy of a knife is a 4 hour long documentary recalling the atrocities of unit 731. This film has some real footage from ww2, along with interviews and of course the poorly made reanactments which are all compiled together in a pretty good way to create this movie.

The real ww2 footage is pretty good in this with some moments being really interesting, the interviews are also good but I do feel as if the person being interviewed is gratifying the atrocities in some way. However the reanactments are just aren't that great, for example the acting is just atrocious and there isn't a single bit of emotional response coming from the victims or even the pathologists and guards. Every time a victim gets strapped to a chair or an operating table they make absolutely zero attempt to struggle or even react to the pain being afflicted, the perpetrators also don't produce any emotional reactions either which is somewhat accurate to historical events but they should have also explored the different ways they couldve looked horrified at the orders given, giving those characters moments of humanity instead of making every member there a mindless psycho cutting into people randomly. Another problem I have with the reanactments is the actors themselves, the majority of unit 731 victims were Chinese with a small amount of russian and an extremely small amount of Americans, however philosophy of a knife has no Chinese victims and instead has a ton of white, russian and American prisoners. This not only white washes the cast of this film but also history itself which is extremely disrespectful to the actual victims. The final problem I have with the reanactments is the extreme butcher shop violence which are ment to be the experiments, the many pathologists just seem to slice and dice in a very non professional way, most of the experiments don't even seem like they have any contribution to science which is kind of the point of experimentation, like there's one "experiment" where they stick a cockroach up a prisoners vagina to see if it will come out the mouth, it isn't even explained why they do this it just happens. The real unit 731 had professional pathologists and doctors which did there work strategically and somewhat professionally when they conducted there inhumane experiments, the professionalism is also whats most horrifying about unit 731 as it shows that even though there profession is targeted at helping people, they still committed these atrocities and I do wish this theme was done better in this movie.

The effects in this film do vary in quality, from crappy effects which look lazy and don't fit the moment and to pretty good effects which did make me cover my face. The makeup is pretty decent as well which definitely excelled the scene at times. The camera quality however wasn't the best with moments being way to shakey and the majority of the camera work being uncomfortable shots just made it get pretty boring after a long while.

The music in this film though is fantastic, being a mixture of uncomfortable ambience and sinister tunes which made this film generally scary at times. A really good example of how good the music is can be seen in the title theme, as the song progresses the music gets more chaotic and distorted which may represent the stages of unit 731 throughout the years, going from questionable experimentation which still remains in the boundaries of ethics and then progresses to extremely evil and Inhumane experimentation which loses its grip on ethics. This progression could also be a euphemism on how the experiments went from improving biological warfare to having little to no connection with the betterment of humanity. Truly chilling stuff.

The intro to this film is pretty cool aswell, having some badass music and some pretty good footage. This moment is the only part of the movie I actually enjoyed and gave me some hope to this being a fairly good movie but was disappointed after seeing the rest of the film.

In conclusion even though this movie has its pretty good moments it still falls short due to the dramatic amount of gore and exploitation, the incredibly long runtime of 4 hours and the poor acting which does let down a really good idea to adapt this dark part of humanity into a movie like this.

This epic is 4 hours long. Much of that 4 hours is the exterior of a building which may or may not be the one in question.

In a prologue the director and I think one of the producers tell us, among other things, that they "did not research" a lot of the facts.

But they say their work is based on facts and that the movie is supposed to be about death and war....

There is a fair amount of interesting stuff in the movie, enough for maybe 90 minutes. But not 4 hours. I think they wanted to give the viewer some sense of ennui by showing the building the falling snow from this angle, from that angle, from another angle...all with no narration over and over. It seemed like about 2 minutes of story and 5 minutes of exterior of building in the falling snow for 4 hours.

I may be exaggerating, but not much. As for the story....

Those who know about Unit 731 may be offended by this film as an effort to cash in on a grisly reputation. Others may be offended by it's portrayal of one American and several Russians as the victims of Unit 731. I am pretty sure the majority of victims were a very diverse group consisting of P.O.W.s from all who fought against Japan, Chinese locals and even Japanese criminals. Pregnant women as well as children were also prey to the heinous Japanese "doctors" of Unit 731.

Regardless, the whole thing to me comes off as lame bondage/torture-porn. That you MIGHT get some idea of a story out of if you take notes when they are actually speaking. Even if you are looking for Bondage/toture-porn keep the remote handy, you have a lot of the building in the falling snow from this angle, from that angle, from another angle...all with no narration over and over to fast forward through.

This movie is four hours long for one reason: director Andrey Iskanov wanted it to be. Lacking enough actual subject matter to warrant a four hour running time, he compensates by having virtually every scene go on for at least twice as long as necessary and inserting numerous shots of snow falling, each of which goes on for several minutes. I would say there's close to a half hour of footage of snow in this movie.

We get surgeons meticulously putting on rubber gloves, prisoners being led down hallways, soldiers trudging through snow, bodies being chopped up, flesh being scraped off a skull, and countless other such sequences all in glorious real time. If tedium and banality are what Iskanov was going for he succeeded admirably.

PHILOSOPHY OF A KNIFE is so devoid of any redeeming quality in its current state it barely even warrants discussion. One of the few positive things I can say about it is that I can see a riveting avant-garde horror movie hidden beneath all the baggage. Had he cut out 2/3 of the running time and tightened up all of his individual scenes, this could have been one of the most effective exercises in Hell-On-Earth sensory overload.

Of course, in an introduction which brings new meaning to the word "pontification," Iskanov informs us that this is not a horror movie, though he expects us unsophisticated westerners to think it is. So maybe I'm even wrong about that. Maybe there's NOTHING good to say about this movie.

Watching this movie has forced me to re-assess my opinion of MEN BEHIND THE SUN, which I thought was little more than an exploitive freak show as well. However, in MEN BEHIND THE SUN director T.F. Mou presented the atrocities in a brutally matter-of-fact manner and allowed us to sympathize somewhat with the prisoners. Now I'm thinking that Mou's film is at least somewhat earnest in its depictions of the horrors of Unit 731.

In PHILOSOPHY, Iskanov re-creates the experiments as highly stylized set-pieces that look more like a Nine Inch Nails music video than an attempt to hit home the true horror of these activities. All (and I mean ALL) the prisoners who are tortured are young, good-looking Russian kids with no backstory whatsoever. I wonder how many female prisoners-of-war during World War II had perfect breasts and shaved pubic hair. And while MEN BEHIND THE SUN acknowledged that Russian, European and American prisoners did fall victim to Unit 731, PHILOSOPHY completely ignores the fact that the vast majority of victims were Chinese.

And if what you want is nothing more than blood and guts, even that fails to live up to the hype. The effects (which Iskanov did himself) are amateurish and sloppy. Only a sequence in which a woman's teeth are pulled is even somewhat effective, not because it's well-done, but because pretty much everyone can imagine how much that would hurt. OLDBOY's teeth pulling scene is far more chilling and horrific than this.

This long, boring, dishonest, self-indulgent movie is a major waste of time. I want my four plus hours back.