Director: Richard Fleischer, Kinji Fukasaku, Toshio Matsuda, Akira Kurosawa (uncredited)
Production Company: Elmo Williams-Richard Fleischer Productions
Country: Japan/USA
Year:1970
Pearl Harbor films. If there is an excuse needed for excessive destruction and the rousing of a patriotic American spirit, film producers need look no further than to the rising sun coming towards Hawaii for the dollar signs. And though this film manages to go between both the American side of affairs and the Japanese, being filmed by two separate crews with different directors and cinematographers, that’s about the extent of the originality, even at this stage in WWII film history. Th rest is pretty much what you’d expect. 2/3 of the runtime with people sending telegrams and having meetings and occasionally training and preparing for battle, and then 1/3 of the film actually getting to what we always knew was coming.
Let’s just say that the action sequences are actually incredible. They feel tactile, miniatures used sparingly but to great effect. The explosions are big and powerful, the camerawork wide at times but coming in handheld when necessary. The editing for these sequences is also magnificent, surprisingly for an action sequence. Maybe this is before the monkeys were let into editing suites, as they are so often today. When you’re actually in the attack, music cut back and just the whine of plane engines and the roar of gunfire, the whoomp! of fireballs, the shouting of men clambering on the ships to survive; it’s a wonderful sequence of film.
It’s just a shame that you have to wake up from the deep sleep you were in to experience it. There’s nothing wrong in theory with showing us all the buildup to the events, trying to get it as realistic as possible, without the interference of manufactured character relationships or dramas that end up making so many films overly-dramatic. But when it’s reduced to boatloads of exposition, bad dialogue, boring scene of telegrams being sent after boring scene of another meeting and another meeting, it’s hard to keep even the sturdiest viewer awake. Unfortunately, until we get to the finale, it’s just really, really dull. There’s too many characters that have no emotion, nobody for me to root for, nothing personal about the film. It’s an exercise in using a filmic version, ironically, of one of those big war maps where they push models around with the big brooms. That’s all the characters are; models. Dummies.
It’s unfortunate, because some parts are really quite interesting, even if only from a cinematic standpoint. Many of the American scenes feel like they were shot by an American, with very Hollywood-esque push-ins and camera movements, whereas many of the Japanese scenes are much more controlled, often with very simple, static frames. It’s so rare to have these kinds of national film styles together, and to show the Japanese side of things, how many of them really didn’t want to have to go through with the attack, in what is a largely American-funded and controlled project. That it’s an utter chore to get to any of the remarkably interesting parts takes all the damn fun out of it, and most of the interest as well.
Rating: 5/10
Review by Kieran Judge
Twitter: kjudgemental
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