Dir: Junya Sato
Usually I love Japanese films, and I'm also a big enthusiast for historical drama's and a certain class of war film, so when I saw this film on the shelf in my local kiosk, I thought I'd been granted a pleasant surprise. After all, this same little shop once surprised me with an excellent Samurai film (the name of which I have long since forgotten).
For those of you unfamiliar with Japanese military history, the Yamoto was a battleship, but not just any battleship. It was in fact the biggest battleship ever built, with the biggest guns and the the biggest expectations and so on and so forth. Alas, it was also a big waste of money for it was built at a time when battleships had become obsolete. This has not stopped a portion of the Japanese glorifying its memory though, and this film, with its cartoon like CGI and bad acting (you know its bad when you don't need to understand what they're saying to see them making a mess of it) is a perfect example of how sentimental people can become with regards to magnificent death machines. Any one would think the Yamoto was a symbol of honour, charity and all things good from watching this film. The plot ignores the historical context and glosses over Japan's many war crimes, focusing instead on the sufferings of the manly crew and their families back home who all die in horrible ways... "I'll wait for you after the war" Says one characters sweet heart, "...in my childhood home of Hiroshima". Its enough to induce mild nausea. The film is pretty dire. The acting sucks. The sentimentality is absurdly over done. The ambience is almost pantomime like and the art direction is poor. The CGI, which could have been a redeming feature, isn't. This film is even worse than 'Pearl Harbour'.
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4 comments:
Worse than Pearl Harbor?! It must have been bad.
That movie should have been called "Battle of Briton and Pearl Harbor and Doolittle's Raiders and Whateverelse"
I think the Yamato was still a pretty big deal, and it wasn't a mistake to build it. They just needed to put it with a carrier group. Battleships were really useful in WWII when it came to a slugging match.
The Yamato was commissioned in an age when the battleship reigned supreme. unfortunately for the Japanese the american had a more sophisticated radar and were able to deliver air superioity and learnt the techniques of aerial scouting faster than the Japanese. By the time the Yamato saw action the tide of the naval war had turned and the deathride of the great ship was a foregone conclusion.
It's too bad that the Yamato and the Bismark had to get sunk. They would have made pretty cool museums.
We'll just have to settle for the Iowa Class ships.
I don't know. Personally I am not all that keen on monster battleships. They strike me as being like movie stars; attention grabbing but lacking substance. Take the Bismark for example. A thundering great ship, massive and deadly, very famous and yet most all it ever did was destroy other ships that couldn't defend themselves. It only ever engaged its equals when these cornered it.
Big 'sexy' battleships get all the attention, but for me the really interesting ships are the ugly ones which did all the work, like the smaller corvetes and destroyers which saw active duty day in and day out in the North Atlantic. I'd rather see one of these ships as a museum to testify the hardships and fortitude of the crew. HMS Belfast in London is such a ship I believe.
Theres also something more impressive about having to work with less than with more, maybe its just me, for this is why I prefer wargaming in the 1930's to the 1940's, but I've never been into the really big death machines of the Second World War. Tiger tanks for example have never held my interest, at least not since I was 14. I prefer the smaller, more obscure. Those machines and inventions that didn't really work all that well, or even better, never worked at all!
Thus, Tesla's death ray and the flying wings. They belong to a world that hadn't yet been totally corrupted by the evil of the Holocaust I suppose, and they exist now only in a world of the imagination which is safer for the mind to contemplate without fear of glorifying real life violence.
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