USS Indianapolis

The movie just doesn't do service to the real events. If you're really interested in the story just read the Wikipedia page. You'll learn more about the events and it'll save you from wasting 2 hours and ten minutes of your life to this awful movie.

I always expect that Hollywood will bungle the details in military movies and usually give them a pass for those. There are SOOO many anachronisms and inaccuracies in this movie though. EVERY scene has something wrong with it. The ship itself, the uniforms, the orders given, the weapons, the lingo, even the sharks. It's beyond distracting. The most glaring example is that they the used a battleship to represent a cruiser. You can have a movie like U-571, which is fictional, and they have more accurate depictions of the submarines and even a German destroyer. Mario Van Peebles is like "hey, the USS Alabama is located in Mobile, let's go film on that." "It's the wrong type of ship though." "It's only a film based on true events, accuracy doesn't matter."

On top of that the writers couldn't have stuffed more cliché, trite military lingo into this movie if they tried. The focus they have on the sharks is weird, and inaccurate. The captains speech made me groan out load. Nicholas cage don't ever do another war movie again! If you've seen Windtalkers you know what I'm talking about. Again, if you really want to know what happened to the USS Indianapolis, take 10 mins and read the Wikipedia or better yet go to the library and find a book about it.

Well, I don't think this movie was quite as bad as some reviewers are making it. I do agree that the direction left something to be desired. Some of the early part of the film was a little sloppy. There were short scenes that seemed to come out of nowhere, and didn't seem to have anything to do with the flow of what we were seeing. As a former military man, I was astonished to see a scene where Nicolas Cage wore a mis-matched khaki naval uniform. Never happen, folks. However, I thought the movie got a little better as it went along. I was very disappointed that race had to be inserted into this. There didn't seem to be any reason why race had to play ANY part in this story. I don't know why so many directors (& producers and writers) seem to feel the need to do this (well, I have my suspicions, but that's a story for another day). The scene of the cook spitting on an officers piece of pie was despicable, and I wondered why that was even included in this. It served absolutely no real purpose. This was, supposedly, a crack naval ship and crew, entrusted with a top secret mission, and a sailor is spitting on an officer's food? But the survival scenes were done fairly well, and it was clear the incredible suffering & tragedy these men were exposed to. I thought the movie started rather poorly, but improved as it went along. I think, perhaps, Van Peebles is lacking in experience, and bit off a bit more than he could chew, but, all in all, I thought it was a decent enough movie. Cage played a fairly stoic, controlled character, but I think that was a good choice on his part. The story was what needed attention, not some overblown character. He seemed to hit the right note as a Naval Ship Captain. The actors all did adequate jobs, and it wasn't exactly a terrible movie.

I don't need to repeat the comments from other one-star (fair) reviews of this piece of junk designed to get quick bucks on opening weekend from moviegoers before word-of-mouth sunk this faster than the USS Indianapolis. Just to illustrate how little the producers, writer and director cared about this movie, they sank a vintage PBY Catalina during filming, and then hired a salvage company that would make the three stooges look like atomic scientists to recover it from the beach where it sank in shallow water.

Three stooges salvage company broke the rare airplane apart while trying to winch it onto a barge. It was destroyed forever.

Obviously, the salvage company had zero clue about the lift points and structural members of the aircraft ... which is about the same as the zero clue that producers had about the historical accuracy of this movie.

Just to illustrate my point, while the vintage PBY Catalina was sitting nose-down in the surf, producers made the decision to knock off a couple of quick scenes on board it while the airplane was sitting there being destroyed in the ocean. (See if you can spot that scene where they filmed footage in the bow of a partially-sunken Catalina.)

This disrespect towards an irreplaceable and invaluable piece of history is matched only by the disrespect they paid to the actual crew of the USS Indianapolis.

Men of Courage is not meant to be anything more than a generic mid- budget war movie with sharks, but it underdelivers even if you keep your expectations low. The script follows historical events pretty closely, but writing has lots of flaws, and romantic storyline is disappointing. Nicolas Cage gives a sensible performance, but his character doesn't move anywhere from "good captain" cliché. The writers add lots of voice-over narration to add depth to characters, which makes things worse. The Japanese captain is reduced to ridicule near the ending, where the two captains burst into tears while saluting each other.

If you only look for special effects, war scenes and sharks wreaking havoc, this movie won't be any less disappointing. Warship effects are of acceptable quality (for television at least), but man-eating sharks are either roughly made CGI, or replaced with smaller sharks which are obviously harmless. Not a single scene shows sharks biting humans; edits carefully avoid that part. No attention is given to the actual details of shark species present on the site of USS Indianapolis demise. For a movie that closely follows actual events (and even includes documentary footage), Men of Courage has an unacceptable number of inaccuracies. It's also badly edited, with scenes interrupted and tied together in strange places. Two hours last like four.

The story of USS Indianapolis appears more fascinating when you read the sources and memoirs, and it certainly deserves a better adaptation than one made by this movie's screenwriters.

The true story of the Indianapolis is a compelling one of bravery, intrigue, unimaginable suffering and governmental cowardice. This movie never comes close to conveying any of that. It rushes through the set-up, never pausing for us to get to know any of the principals in any depth. The movie can't wait to get to the sharks, but when it does, it almost turns into a comedy of unconvincing action, gaps in logic, ridiculous dialogue and clumsy CGI. Poor Nic Cage is reduced to a near catatonic state, forced into unnatural situations and dubious decisions. In Jaws, Spielberg did a better job in five minutes with Quint's recounting of his Indianapolis experience than this movie does in two hours. A fiasco. McHale's Navy was more realistic.