A Queda de Okinawa

How do you go about depicting one of the largest and most violent battles of the Pacific Theater of WWII? Is it possible to capture the ugliness and gruesomeness of a battle with 150,000 civilian casualties on celluloid and most important can any depiction by one or the other side be really impartial? The Battle of Okinawa (BOO from now on) succeeds beyond all expectations on the first and better than it has any right to in the second - it doesn't resort to cheap flag-waving but it's not without a sense of patriotism either.

The first hour of the film is devoted to the strategic planning of the battle - Kihachi Okamoto however is smart enough to spice up what in lesser hands could have been boring exposition and setup with a breakneck pace that makes this first hour just whiz by. As is obvious from the title, the protagonist in BOO is the battle - and its victims. It's not a character-driven piece as all the main characters are painted in broad strokes but it's a sprawling war drama that takes us in a bloody tour through every pore, nook and cranny of Okinawa - from the shellshocked trenches and battlegrounds to the primitive hospital set up in a cave lacking all necessities and in itself an image of Dante-ish hell on earth, people screaming and passing out and others having their legs amputated with dull hacksaws and nurses trying to ventilate the place so the injured won't suffocate, to women and children and other civilians hudled together in a cave and gas bombed by American troops to the Army headquarters where officers argue for tactics. Nothing is spared by Okamoto's lens - this is literally the battle of Okinawa in all its morbid glory.

The credentials of the creative team should be the final guarantee that BOO is a movie well worth seeing. Directed by Kihachi Okamoto (SWORD OF DOOM, KIRU, RED LION) and written by Kaneto Shindo (ONIBABA, KURONEKO) and with Tatsuya Nakadai and Tetsuro Tamba spearheading the cast, you really can't go wrong here. It's as bleak and nihilistic as Okamoto's previous chambara output would suggest and not an easy watch for the squeamish - but therein lies the true power of the movie. Even when it resorts to images we might consider trite by now (a little child walking through dozens of corpses in the aftermath of the battle) it's still done with conviction that is true to story and setting.

If we have become jaded by all the images of war and suffering the news networks have only been too eager to churn out and exploit for our curious eyes, war and suffering has lost none of its potency. BOO is not an impartial depiction of the battle - how could it be? It's not a documentary anyway. The patriotism and self-sacrifice of Japanese troops (a form of seppuku in itself) must have made eyes in Tokyo, Hiroshima and Kyoto glisten with tears. Is it not understandable though? Okamoto is not carried away with sentimentality though - this is a slice of war brutality and comes with arms chopped and parents killing their children so they won't fall in enemy hands.

Little known but impressively detailed and completely uncompromising depiction of the battle of Okinawa from the Japanese perspective. I think it deserves a rerelease or more exposure, because as an antiwar film, it's very impressive, and even ahead of its time.

American war films were still a fair way off from showing war in a truly hellish manner at this point in film history- there's a real misery in this one that prevents any battle scenes from being fun or exciting to watch, even if there is a degree of spectacle due to the relatively high budget.

That sense of doom and inevitable loss, coupled with the savage violence that pulls absolutely no punches (it's comparable to Saving Private Ryan, yet came out over 1/4 of a century earlier) makes it a tough but engaging watch, and it mostly earns its lengthy runtime of 2.5 hours.

And of course, a war film like this shouldn't pull punches. It's generally far better to show war on film as ugly rather than exciting, especially a conflict like the one on Okinawa.

Characters are simple but serviceable, and despite the limited character development, you can feel some sympathy for them as individuals stuck in a conflict, whilst still feeling angry at the whole institution of war itself. The way it occasionally checked in on how civilians were coping was particularly powerful and unique, too.

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.

I bought this movie for a higher price than i'd care to admit, expecting a interesting take on the Battle of Okinawa with real facts and maybe some cool battle scenes. I was extremely disappointed.

Over the entire movie we are presented with the spiritually pure Japanese angels desperately fighting against those American Yankee murderers that only win the battle because they have unlimited ammo hack Thompson's that they spray and pray without discrimination, as well as some obligatory war crime weapons like chemical bombs. Which as a reviewer before mentioned was not even in use during the Okinawa invasion. I at the same time understand and hate the decision by movie-makers to portray ones own side in a better light than the other. But deliberately making your own side seem so good as it was presented in this movie is borderline historical revisionism. Which is a curse word in my dictionary.

One thing that irked me: Okinawan's were treated like trash by the Japanese during the actual invasion, yet here we are presented with Okinawan civilians that gets denied the great honor of joining the mass suicide of the Japanese soldiers, but eventually after proving their spirit the Japanese soldiers kindly allow them to use one of their grenades to off themselves. I have no doubts that some Okinawan's wanted to willingly kill themselves, but mainly the Okinawan's actually wanted to surrender to the Americans due to how crappy the Japanese treated them, using them as human shields and deliberately forcing them to kill themselves.

Also the combat scenes themselves mainly consists of the Japanese soldiers trying to get stabby stabby while the Americans use 2000 bullets on each of the Japanese in return. There is a lot of gore and blood everywhere, but it comes off as fake and stupid with the bad fighting choreography and the random narrator commenting on how "glorious" the Japanese defenders were.

I suspect the Japanese ultra-nationalists welcome this movie's inaccuracy, but at the same time it also fails as a entertaining movie. The document mixed with the bad acting makes this entire ordeal seem like a lifeless propaganda film that i could easily imagine being created by the actual WW2 Japanese government. That this was actually created 20 years afterwards is astonishing to me.

The history is not actually completely wrong, it is just glaced with lies to make it seem factual. That makes this the worst attempt at propaganda i have ever seen. And i hope that whoever Japanese director that wrote the line "this is the best war movie ever made" which made me buy the movie will be forced to watch Fires on the plain, letters of Iwo Jima or Stalingrad so he can see an actual good war movie and how pointless war actually is.

Man i could go on and on about how bad this movie is To sum it up, this is a stupid jingoistic and historically wrong document movie with many horrible combat scenes.

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.