Kamikaze (Okinawa Zero)

The film is pretty bad across the board. Even ignoring the poor special effects due to budget, the direction and editing is poor. A tighter script and decent editing would have done wonders for what could have been a good film. The story line is grim, of course, but is badly handled and is an emotionless tale of waste. To get an emotional response from an audience you need to care about the characters, and that empathy is what the movie truly lacks. The film is a docudrama, but lacks drama and the power of a documentary. It's worth a look, but is certainly not a good film. Compare BoO with Story of a Prostitute, Fires on the Plain, or The Burmese Harp, and you'll understand why it is a forgotten film.

Battle of Okinawa is a film directed by the now legendary Kihachi Okamoto. It stars Tatsuya Nakadai and Tetsuro "I'm in every Japanese film" Tamba. Both show off their acting chops in this film and deliver outstanding performances. Don't get me wrong though, there are dozens of actors in this film with almost equal scream time as these two men. This is definitely an ensemble piece on one of the most gruesome slaughters on the Japanese armies front. This film is not easy to watch. It is much more violent than "Letters From Iwo Jima" and as in "Iwo" we see how fanatical the Japanese army was at this point in history. Being taken prisoner was not an option and losing meant death or forever living in dishonor. This notion is even implemented to civilians who in this move kill themselves in droves. Tatsuya Nakadai's character is one of the few characters who believes that suicide in not the only option in defeat. He is the western voice in the film for his character even studied in America. This is a hard core war film that takes no prisoners. I recommend you go out and buy this film for it is now available in R1 DVD thanks to the fine folks at AnimEigo.

I'm really surprised at the positive reviews this film has received and the high IMDb rating. Reading them at times I wondered if we was watching the same movie. I'm going to have to disagree with the other reviewers and say that the film doesn't work, either historically or dramatically.

Historically, it's wildly inaccurate. The whole movie suffers from the need to portray the Japanese in the best possible and most heroic light. A few examples: by April, 1945, the Japanese pilot corps had been almost totally destroyed. The Japanese were unable to train new pilots at the rate they were being killed. This is one reason why they resorted to suicide attacks. And yet we are to believe that large air forces still exist and were not employed in Okinawa because the army was unwilling to attack the American forces and recapture the air fields to the north. Another example is the Yamato. The Japanese Navy in the north had been almost destroyed, and what remained lacked fuel, but the admiralty felt the need to make some sort of gesture and sent their largest battleship. The plan had always been to beach and scuttle the ship on Okinawa and use it as a gun platform, but instead we are told that it's mission was to bravely sail amongst the Americans and fight until it was out of ammo. Unfortunately before she could do that, she was attacked by those dastardly Americans who flew gigantic squadrons of planes against her (100 planes attacking a single ship at once?). What tripe.

Unlike movies like "Tora Tora Tora" or "Midway", there is no attempt to personalize or portray the other side as anything but mindless, bloodthirsty automatons. The Americans are shown as surprisingly weak, unable to cope with the Japanese in hand to hand combat, and most of the Japanese appear to die by artillery fire or mowed down by tanks. It's the kind of chauvinism one would expect from a John Wayne movie.

Now, I don't expect historical accuracy from a John Wayne movie, but I do expect it to be entertaining. However, this movie is just too confusing and poorly written. Worse of all, it resorts to melodrama. I lost count of how many times women and children were used to manipulate the audience's emotions.

All in all, I don't recommend it.

I have a desire to look deeply into films from 1971 and came upon this oddity which is on R1 DVD, but still pretty much unknown. It is directed by Kihachi Okamoto who was a versatile director, happy directing comedy alongside such far as Dai-bosatsu tôge / Sword of Doom (1966), perhaps the greatest chambara movie going. As well as that The Battle of Okinawa stars Tetsurô Tanba and Tatsuya Nakadai, the two most famous Japanese actors of a generation disregarding Mifune. No slouch at directing himself (Onibaba, Kuroneko) Kaneto Shindô was involved in writing the script. So there's pedigree aplenty for the movie.

The Battle of Okinawa ended very shortly before the atomic bombings ended the entire conflict in the Pacific. It was a battle of cataclysmic ferocity that accounted for the lives of a quarter of a million people, which included a third of the island's civilian population. It was almost the end of a civilisation and a way of life, Okinawans having a distinctive culture that was almost obliterated here. The Americans never left, almost a fifth of the island is still occupied by US military bases.

The movie is both educational on the tactical side of the battle, but also revelatory about Japanese culture of the time. The military triumvirate on the Japanese side consisted of General Ushijima, and his two subordinates Lieutenant General Isamu Cho (Tanba) and Colonel Hiromichi Yahara (Nakadai). Ushijima is an almost catatonic buddha who admits having inferior tactical knowledge and so chooses sides in arguments between Cho and Yahara. Cho tends to favour aggression, Yahara is always more moderate. Nakadai here wears the same expression on his face all the way through the movie, maybe he grimaced and the wind changed, for he wore it all the way through Hideo Gosha's great movie The Wolves, also released in 1971. Joking aside though it's an iconic expression, which is awesomely fatalistic, seeming in one go to express the sheer lunacy of the pro-imperial attitudes in the army, and the desire to die. Yahara's appears to be the greatest lunacy though, he opts to let the American forces land unopposed in order to conserve ammunition, which would be needed for later in the battle.

There are many terrible things that happened during the battle, so many families committed suicide in order to avoid contact with the American troops. It's still a point of controversy as to how willing they were, and how much they were forced to by the army. Families gathered round in circles and unpinned grenades, the survivors attempted to batter each other out of their misery. Quite spectacular suicide missions are commemorated. For example a plane landing in a US-controlled airfield (the rest of the squadron succumbing to anti-aircraft fire), troops disembarking and throwing grenades at the US planes, entirely without hope of surviving It's quite interesting to discuss whether the movie glorified the resistance, certainly suicide missions are shown as heroic, whilst entirely unpalatable to the Western eye, but also the movie does question whether there is more to life, a greater reason to live than merely to serve the Emperor.

Some disappointments from a cinematic point of view, firstly the archive footage that announces the film is shot in 4:3 but here massively stretched to 2.35:1, which looks pretty sloppy. Then the film is not very well budgeted I feel so the action often looks kind of fake, but also there wasn't enough cash in the kitty to get Americans over, so the American soldiers (who generally hide their faces, are seen from behind or in the distance) are played by Japanese as well. Luckily we don't see Americans very often, their presence is only known via artillery bombardment, and when we do it's not Thompson sub-machine-guns that they're carrying. Actual combat scenes are very stylised and reminiscent of jidai-geki such as Ran in the way that the platoons of soldiers behave. It's fortunate that the Americans don't play a part in the movie, to the defenders on Okinawa they may as well have been Martians, the issues here were all Japanese, about what attitude to take in the face of cultural destruction and overwhelming incursion. That's not to downplay the loss of American life, but that would simply be for another movie.

I felt in the end that the film was a fitting testament to the deaths of the defenders of Okinawa and the populace. The movie kind of captures an essence of bravery, lunacy and hollow childlike subservience, as well as the sheer devastating horror.

From the director of the terrific "Japan's Longest Day", this is an ambitious documentary-styled recreation of the battle for Okinawa, where hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians were abandoned by the Japanese military in order to better protect the mainland. The soldiers fortified themselves in caves and fended of an overwhelming American attack over a period of several months. Unfortunately, the filmmaker's talents don't match their ambitions. "Japan's Longest Day" was a fascinating film written by Shinobu Hashimoto about a little known military revolt at the end of the war. Okinawa is dramatically inept with misplaced bits of humor, and the crowd scenes never number more than 50, making it seem far less epic than it purports to be. The photography is bland and the blood very fake. The desperation never seeps in like it should, but the film does a good job of showing what they went through. It also shows that when the going gets tough, the Japanese commit suicide - according to this film it must have been the leading cause of death. The events depicted are similar to "Sands of Iwo Jima" - so if you like that you might like this. Okinawa is still occupied by American forces. Script by Kaneto Shindo ("Onibaba").