Otoko-tachi no Yamato (2005) Reviews

• My take on "Yamato"

  wandering-star2007-02-24

  I am almost through a great book on the history of Japan in WWII. The naval battles are fascinating to read about, and so when I saw this movie in the local Asian mall I picked it up. Yamato (the old name for Japan) has good and bad points. Starting with the good - I find the story fascinating, how the remainder of the Second fleet made a run for Okinawa on a mission that everyone knew was suicide due to lack of air support (Japan's air force had been finally crushed at Saipan). Some of the acting was great; I thought Uchida really stood out. As far as I can tell the film was very historically accurate. Some of the insights into "bushido" were interesting, especially the admiral's explanation of bushido vs. English chivalry. And some of the effects were pretty good too. On the bad side... the film had kind of a made-for-TV movie feel. As I said, some of the effects were good, others were far from great. The director shied away from showing the large sections of the ship, or the whole ship, maybe because of lack of budget - but I found myself really wanting to see those shots of this 65,000 ton superbattleship. It was obvious the whole film was made in a studio. They really should have invested in substantial steel tubes for the anti-aircraft guns, the fact that they jittered around like toys bothered me. Also in the silent dialog scenes, there should have been an omnipresent rumble of the ship's engines to add to the illusion that we are on the largest battleship in the world. It wasn't great, but I enjoyed it anyway, and anyone else who is interested in Japanese naval history I think will also enjoy it despite its shortcomings.

• A powerful film that really drives home the humanity of war

  UberNoodle2008-06-12

  I am so disappointed to see some posters turning their reviews into cold historical commentary. Did this film not teach you anything? I couldn't help but be immensely moved by this film. It steers well clear of overly political and historical commentary and focuses on the young sailors and their loved ones. The hardship of the Japanese in the second world war was not unlike any other nations' peoples' hardship. Their loved ones went to war and never returned; they lost their livelihoods and what they loved; they were powerless to the whims of their leaders. This film shows People. People in tragic times. People fighting for their loves and their lives. Whether it is Yamato, Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line, Brotherhood, Stone's trilogy, Eastwood's duo of films, etc, it comes down to people trying to live. So much has been said about the film that is political but I ask you, what is the point of doing so for a film that strove so hard to in favour of a human story? After years of revisionist Hollywood war films, it is ironic that this moving film, Yamato, be raked over coals for inaccuracies or romanticism. Besides this, however, and a technical note, the film's visual effects are excellent for a non-Hollywood film. I wouldn't be surprised if Yamato was one of the most expensive Japanese films ever made. While making an ocean going battleship replica was not an option, the sets, miniatures and CGI create a very gritty and realistic feeling of being aboard the fated ship. Musically the film is also very striking and has some memorable themes throughout. The sound track is also superb with excellent separation in the 5.1 channels. The battle scenes are especially vivid in their aural presentation. The amount of heart, work and effort that went into the film is clear from the exceptional cast, sound and competent visuals and their passionate and honest performances and work. This is definitely a film for the world to see. It is not a war film about "war"; it is a film about love. The message rings loud and clear until the final note of the closing credit's song.

• Very powerful film, and revolutionary, too

  taiheiyokid2006-01-20

  I am an American PhD student based in both Japan and Micronesia doing extensive fieldwork with the survivors of the Pacific War in the Pacific Islands and Japan--as well as the families of war dead. Since I have been really involved most recently with the families of soldiers and sailors who died in the Pacific, I naturally wanted to see this movie. I found myself with tears in my eyes from the very beginning, because it was as if all the black and white photographs I have been generously shown by these families were coming to life--the young faces of these sailors, frightened, proud, and eager to live up to their responsibilities, were very true to what I sense was really happening in the 1940s. I have to say, unlike the very propagandist flavor of many American films about the Pacific War, including most recently 'Pearl Harbor,' this film really delves into the traumatic aspects of masculinity in general and having to live up to "being a man" in Japan just as much as it celebrates the humanity of the people involved. Many American films, with the exception of 'Saving Private Ryan' and several films about Vietnam, tend to stick to very comic-like stark depictions of heroes and villains and an overall sense of being "victimized" by the enemy. Here, the enemy is not the United States but rather masculinity and male pride itself, as well as the whole tragic story they create. As such, it is a welcome remedy to way too much American-biased victory narratives that obscure the face of the Japanese military, and to films that portray menacing, dehumanized battalions of Japanese soldiers advancing forth without any legitimate context of their own. We see in this film the faces of these young men and understand what situation they were coming from. That said, clearly the film was trying to be sensitive to war bereaved and to the official narratives of Japanese pretexts for war, and in that sense I feel they overdid it a little. We don't get a sense, for instance, about Japan's colonial presence throughout Asia and the Pacific--only the vague notion that Japan somehow got involved in war. Still, this isn't really a film about why the war happened, but rather about how it was to live and fight in the immediate time preceding Japanese surrender. In that sense, I do want to make the critique that this film really could have done with even MORE contextualization and solid research of popular Japanese culture at the time, because this would have added even more to its convincing sense of reality. For instance, the soundtrack would have been greatly enhanced with some of the evocative marching music and the ballads on the radio in the 1930s and 1940s that encouraged young men to join the navy and go south to the South Seas. These songs are still sung even by the bereaved families who go back to visit the places where their loved ones died, so it would have been quite powerful if we got to hear them throughout the film. The absence of small details like this, some rather poorly-imitated Japanese regional dialects, and some of the melodramatic overacting by a few members of the cast, detracted somewhat from the overall production. But in general, this is a very fine film, extremely well acted (and compassionately so) by its cast. I have been reading a book about the film in Japanese and it's fascinating to learn how so many of the cast worked directly with Japanese veterans and the bereaved families in order to develop their characters and their behavior. So in many respects this film is not only based on the realities of battle (which are really just the backdrop) but on the real life realities of war and on being a young man in the Japanese Imperial Navy in 1944-1945. In all, it's an extremely meaningful film that needs to be distributed widely through the world. I know there is a lot of resistance to its release in China and Korea, understandably, but I think this is a portrait of what was going on for Japanese at the time and as such could even work as a tool to facilitate better understanding in these countries. It is essential that more compassionate films like this are made that go on to address the complexity and horror of what happened in Asia and the Pacific-- to the people whose lives were colonized and ruined by Japanese aggression, but at least it's a start. It appears to me that Japanese popular culture is finally ready to address the war in all of its ugliness and begin to heal some of these old wounds.

• Ambitious yet disappointing

  leforcat2007-02-15

  I guess the ambition of this film is to show the personal drama taking place alongside the big drama of the last ditch demise of the great "Yamato", and from this point of view the film performs well but expectable. There is the tragedy of young lives being lost for a lost cause, the psychological wounds of the survivors that never heals. There's also the mandatory journey to the spot of the disaster made on an anniversary by one of the survivors and a daughter to another, maybe inspired by J. Cameron's "Titanic". Factually, though, the film is a failure. It would of course be impossible to make a replica of the ship, so it has been recreated digitally, and to excellent effect in the few scenes you actually view the whole ship, or most of it, making its way through the seas. Those moments alone are worth the price of the ticket. But the budget didn't cover much more than that. The mock-up of certain parts of the ship look just like mock-up, we don't even get to know about one light cruiser and several destroyers that followed "Yamato" to disaster (most of them were also sunk) and we don't see one single US ship (aircraft from at least 12 American aircraft carriers participated in fending off the Japanese). What's worse, we are not told how the battle developed or what tactics were used by the Japanese task force nor by the US air squadrons. The great battleship was eventually sunk after being hit by many torpedoes and several big, armor-piercing bombs, but most of what we see is low flying US aircraft strafing the crew and hitting the decks with small caliber ordnance, causing incredible carnage. The strafing did take place on several occasions during the day, the ship was also hit by small rockets from F4U Corsair fighters, but it all had marginal effect. The huge 456 mm guns are seen firing away towards the approaching aircraft, and while this in fact did happen, one couldn't stay exposed on deck, as the enormous blast would probably kill or at least severely injure you, so crew were forbidden on the outside on such occasions. All in all, the never-ending screams of dying seamen don't make up for the lack of most of other angles of this last major battle of WWII. All in all, some 3000 Japanese lives were lost on the "Yamato" alone, plus more than a thousand more on the accompanying ships, without disturbing the US Okinawa operations in any way. Some figures are mentioned in the film but the tragedy of this sacrifice in not fully pointed out. During the day the US lost 12 airmen and 10 airplanes.

• Excellent war movie that alludes to many themes.

  PWNYCNY2014-04-25

  This is a great movie. It refutes the shallow, stereotypical portrayal of Japanese in World War Two American movies. When considering atrocities such as The Bataan Death March, it is easy to say, "Good for them, they deserved what they got." Yet, the movie is about Japanese valor. The question is: is it contrived or was it real? Here, the roles are reversed. The Japanese are heroes and the Americans the faceless enemy. The Yamato went down fighting; en entire fleet pf plans were required to sink her, and when she sunk, she went out with a huge bang - that is a fact. The movie dramatizes the dedication and bravery of the Japanese sailor and the steadfast valor of the civilians. The movie is not a polemic. It neither excuses or apologizes Japanese policies. Of course, one can say that this movie does not square with the Japanese record of brutality during the war. But that does not mean that the themes of this movie are contrived. The Japanese government ordered the Yamato on a kamikaze mission. Whether this was heroic is a matter of debate. But what is certain is that the ship took a beating and 3,000 crew died, and that is a story that should not be forgotten. They fought and they died. As the movie shows, the Japanese were caught up in a war that produced a catastrophic defeat for them. It is just too bad that they had adopted a foreign policy that in retrospect was misguided and provocative, but it happened and hopefully it will not happen again. A few other comments: This movie alludes to but does not fully expand on how the Yamato was a symbol, not only for the Japanese, but for the United States. While the Yamato symbolized Japanese pride, for the United States it was symbol of aggression, and something that not only had to be destroyed but absolutely purged from the face of the planet. Hence, the United States devoted an entire fleet of planes to ensuring that the Yamato met an ignoble ending. The movie shows that how the Yamato was not only bombed, but was repeatedly strafed and torpedoed. According to historical accounts, the Yamato took at least twenty direct hits. What the movie also brings out was that the Yamato was on a kamikaze mission, so it was provided no air cover, which made it a virtual open target. The Yamato crew are portrayed as being valiant, but valiant for what and for whom? One scene shows where a fight breaks out between two factions, one who questioned the use of fighting and the other that was determined to fight on. However, this theme is not further explored. The whole question of treating 3,000 men as being expendable is a theme that could have been further explored too. The sinking of the Yamato should have provided enough cause for any rational government to conclude that further fighting was useless, but that did not happen. The war destined to drag on for another four months, during which time there took place the Battle of Okinawa and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all of which had catastrophic consequences for the Japanese. The movie also shows how discipline was enforced through corporal punishment, which puts the Japanese abuse of POWs in a broader cultural context. For the Japanese, at least in the military, beating up on people considered inferior was considered appropriate conduct and a legitimate form of discipline. Given the fanaticism of the Japanese military, it is not surprising that it took not one but two atomic bombs to finally convince them to stop fighting, and that was only after the emperor personally interceded. As the movie shows, World War Two was a disaster for Japan, and a tragedy for the Japanese people who had to pay the price for policy decisions that opened their country up to destruction and leaving a legacy that to this day continues to besmirch that country's reputation.