Hiroshima - Inferno di cenere

An absolutely boring, badly acted and filmed mess of a movie. Max Von Sydow gives what must be the worst performance of his entire career. Totally without any redeeming features I found this film to be unwatchable. Apart from Von Sydow the remaining cast are a mixture of second rate American and Asian actors who seem to me competing to give the worst possible performance in this piece of rubbish. Avoid at all costs!.

This is a partially historically accurate account of the Hiroshima bombing. The only flaw was it was a bit slanted against America, making the bombing out to be a war crime, and yet under the circumstances it was certainly less so than, for example, the rape of Nanking.

Had America not dropped the bombs and instead invaded Japan, many more people would have died, probably over 500,000 including at least 100,000 Americans.

The direction was a bit sloppy by times with too many repetitive scenes. There could have been some better character development, or if there was not enough time leave out one of the sub-plots and pay more attention to the others.

Overall it was a fairly good history lesson, with some talented actors such as Max von Sydow and Tamlyn Tomita.

If you watch this film you would have no idea of the huge number of military casualties form the Hiroshima naval base where the bomb inflicted 44,000 military casualties (10,000 Japanese soldiers and sailors dead, 33,000 inured). As a military target, Hiroshima was a major army base that housed the headquarters of the Japanese 5th Division and the 2nd Army Headquarters. It was also an important port in southern Japan and a communications center. Hiroshima naval base was home port to a huge number of Japanese Navy vessels, and where the bombing of pearl harbor exercises and testing took place. You would also not know from this film that new peer reviewed work in Korea and China show that if the surrender had been delayed another four months, an additional five million persons would have died in Japanese army occupied China, Korea, Philippines, south Asia and Oceania. And how is it we see the "daily lives" of the Hiroshima civilians without seeing that nearly 50% were directly working in war economy production, including munitions production??

I thought this movie was completely missconceived. First of all, the Japanaes residents of Hiroshima speaking english makes no sense... Then the American POWs running around town after the explosion... Please, give me a break! The characters in general where all very shallow, we never get to feel anything for anybody. Some characters are downright ridiculous, like the catholic priest played by Max von Sydow and his (comical) assistants. Scenes featuring the latter are almost farsical. All in all, this motion picture comes together as a garbled mess, one that is boring and emotionless (for a film on such a topic, hard to believe). And the ending.... No comment.

This film concentrates more on the character development of several key figures, rather than on the actual bombing itself. That is the strength of the movie. The moral dilemma of whether to drop a bomb on a city that would kill at least 100,000 people, or but not doing so, initiate a conventional invasion of the Japanese mainland that would have taken several MILLION lives (both American and Japanese seems to logically point to less damaging alternative. However, some naive individuals, including one reviewer, believe losing the millions of lives would not have been an atrocity. All war is an atrocity.

The film is well-directed and the players produce non-hysterical performances in a narrative that covers several key characters simultaneously. One is a doctor with thousands of victims, no hospital supplies and no other doctors around, another is a student at a boys school, one is a Japanese woman who admires American culture, and others include a priest and American POWS. Max Van Syndow gives a moving performance. This movie makes The Day After and others in the genre look like trips to Disneyland.