Okinawa

The battle for Okinawa in the Ryukyu Islands just south of Japan, trailing off Kyushu like a jet stream was the final battle of World War II in the Pacific. Commanding the Navy Task Force was Raymond Spruance the victor at Midway and it was the largest flotilla ever put together, over 1500 ships. Not to mention the Army and Marine forces who did the fighting on land. As this was Japan's back door so to speak they fought with ferocious intensity with full use of the Kamikaze suicide planes.

The story of Okinawa needed an epic film like The Longest Day. Instead we got a hastily put together film with a lot of cliché stock characters from war films of the era. Pat O'Brien stars as the skipper of the destroyer on which this film's story is told and Richard Denning is his executive officer.

They may be top billed but O'Brien and Denning take second place in screen time to the crew of one of the naval guns on the destroyer. The crew consists of Rhys Williams, Richard Benedict, James Dobson and Cameron Mitchell who dumbed down his command of the English language to the level of Leo Gorcey. The crew is mostly sitting around waiting for the Kamikaze attacks which they know will come.

Okinawa is not a horribly bad film, but with an epic title like that it sure falls short of the mark. The Army, Navy, and Marines who fought there deserved something much better.

I was in the navy during the vietnam war. I was deployed to vietnam twice and served on several different navy ships. The characters in this movie would have fit right in with the rest of us.

Wow- This is the first time I have ever seen this movie and I've seen nearly every war movie made.

Why did they even bother - this whole movie totally sucks - the acting is wooden and 3rd rate - the action totally blows - with the exception of actual war scenes and this was a total waste of film.

Please find the film and burn it - it is the biggest waste of time and money ever. And here I thought that Ed Wood created stupid movies - this one is the worst. What was anyone thinking when they wrote this much less filmed it.

I consider it one of the worst war movies ever - and that is saying something.

The two stars are for the men who fought in Okinawa; i served there in the 412th Transportation Co in 1968. I have seen every film ever made about WW 2, which is in the hundreds, and this one, by far, is the worst of all of them.

The film is merely a collection of stock footage, and not one scene is filmed on the island itself. The "action" in the film comes in the last five minutes of an hour quickie made by some sleazy Hollywood exec who figured he could squeeze out a few bucks from the name of the battle. Hopefully, he is roasting somewhere right now.

There is no acting or directing in this "film"; it is mostly stock footage. The poor guy who did most of the work in this movie was the editor. Pathetic.

I don't get the hate for this movie. It's not cheap, it's deliberately small, focused and about as emotionally involved as you can get with a small crew of men acting in a 1940s way. I almost wish we hadn't had the bridge scenes with the command crew, and had to entirely take it from the point of view of the gun crew. That's how history happens; people go about their little part, and get these rare little views of the big action.

I was unusually not disturbed by the cookie cutter characters. We rarely see how they really are, but instead get their public face, to their crewmen while at war. People fall into bravado and storytelling just like this. There were moments of doubt and fear that showed this off I think, very well.

Stock footage, sure. But only rarely did I notice the grain mismatching, and they spent an awful lot of effort to make it blend into the narrative. My favorite of these is about 50 minutes in when one of the characters grabs onto a fitting on the gun to lean out and look at a heavily damaged passing ship. They did this because in the foreground of the stock footage is a sailor doing just that. It brought the stock into the story, and is such unseen stock of such specific damage you could never have simulated it with new footage, especially in the 50s.

I was especially pleased with the sets. I guess they are sets due to lighting and so on, but the interior of the gun mount looks absolutely perfect and realistic, and absolutely unexpectedly so. It really helped with the verisimilitude of the whole endeavor.