La bataille de la mer de corail

It's 1942. Lt. Cmdr. Jeff Conway (Cliff Robertson) commands the American submarine USS Dragonfish in the Pacific. He is given a reconnaissance mission and spots the Japanese fleet. Before he could report it, his crew gets captured and he is forced to scuttle his ship. They are transferred to an island prison where they join some Australian captives.

For a war movie, this starts with a lot of peeping at girls' butts. There is a bit of naval action. They use a lot of miniatures and some stock films. Then it's a series of story problems. First, all the Allied soldiers are way too cavalier. When they transfer the submarine crew to the island, there are only about ten of them. I don't know what happened to the rest of the crew. A lot of the prison life feels wrong and the escape is even more wrong. The best part of the movie is probably the last five minute during the Battle of the Coral Sea. It uses a few clips of real footage, but even here, the miniature footage looks so fake. Given the subject matter, this is a disappointment.

"The characters and incidents portrayed and the names used herein are fictitious, and any similarity to the name, character or history of any person is entirely accidental and unintentional", says the opening credits. That statement is just about the most accurate thing in this film.

The Battle of the Coral Sea was a strategically-important naval engagement fought between the U.S. and Japanese Navies between 4 and 8 May 1942. It stopped a Japanese attempt to carry out an amphibious invasion against Port Moresby, the last Allied stronghold in new Guinea. It also stopped Japanese expansion towards Australia.

However, there is nothing in this movie about the Battle of the Coral Sea until the last ten minutes. The rest is a fairly routine story about POWs and their warders. consequently any viewer interested in learning about the Battle of the Coral Sea is advised to look elsewhere than this mis- named movie.

I am pleased to see that the vast majority of my IMDB colleagues have already done the heavy spadework required to bury this awful movie. Therefore, there is little for me to add beyond the fact that the film's title, as this review's title indicates, is your classic Hollywood bait and switch. In other words if you tune into this thing hoping to see some classic, naval combat then you will be grievously disappointed since the eponymous clash does not occur until the last five minutes or so and is mostly conveyed through stock footage. The vast majority of this dull dog is comprised of standard sub stuff and sub standard Japanese prison camp stuff (Think midget "Kwai" with a lobotomy). Give it a C minus.

The Japanese lost the 11,000 ton light-carrier Shoho, while the Americans lost the much more valuable Lexington. In addition, each-side had a top-notch CV (Shokaku and Yorktown) damaged. The Japanese had a 3rd carrier, Zuikaku, which was undamaged during the battle. Based on that, the Japanese won the battle, however, their air group was punished heavily. Their carriers were assigned to support the invasion of Port Moresby, and they had suffered a lot of plane losses so that they no longer felt confident they could do this. So, this swings it to an overall draw.

In the end, it would be the Japanese who were hurting more, because the Americans not only had a lot more pilots in reserve, and thus could replace losses more easily, at this point in the war the Japanese Navy had the more experienced pilots. So, losing pilots hurt them more than it hurt the USA. Also, it took nearly 2 months to sail Shokaku back to Japan and repair her, but Yorktown headed for Pearl Harbor and was patched-up and ready for battle (although not fully repaired) in 3 days.

Incidentally, their plane/pilot losses were so heavy that Zuikaku sat out the battle of Midway waiting for replacement pilots. This was a huge mistake since the 5th flight deck would have been invaluable.

With the Japanese Navy steadily advancing towards Australia the decision is made to send a submarine named the U. S. S. Dragonfish out into the Coral Sea to gather intelligence on all enemy ships in that area and then proceed to a highly classified rendezvous point to deliver whatever information they may have collected. The man in charge of this mission is "LtCmdr Jeff Conway" (Cliff Robertson) is given strict orders to do whatever is necessary to prevent the Japanese from discovering the rendezvous point. However, his determination to carry out this order is soon tested after he is forced to scuttle the submarine and his men are subsequently tortured in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp pending his cooperation. Now rather than reveal any more I will just say that this film started off relatively well and remained entertaining up until the final 10 minutes or so when stock war footage was inserted for effect. That being said, while certainly not a great war film by any means, it managed to keep my attention for the most part and I have rated it accordingly.