Not even bad in a good way

Absolutely the worst movie.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

NOTE: Although the producers of "Hell in the Pacific" have denied that the script for their film is in any way derivative, it does bear striking similarities to both "Kataki" and a television drama, "The Sea Is Boiling Hot", which was also written by Shimon Wincelberg. COMMENT: Despite the unimaginative title, this is a war picture with a difference. Shot amid the lush jungle greenery and rolling blue breakers of the Palau Islands in crystal clear color photography that must easily rank as the best of the year, director John Boorman boldly and imaginatively with rhythmic cutting (the bamboo falling on the water sequence, the flights through the undergrowth) and an atmospheric music score, plays out a fascinating exercise in human relationships and survival.The off-beat screenplay is actually a monologue carried by Lee Marvin, but such is the potency of the situations and the forceful energy with which Boorman handles them, the picture's 103 minutes slip by like a summer shower.

. ...In 1969 I was a Marine infantryman. The Corps sent me to RVN free of charge. I did, however, get to spend time in Hong Kong. While others may have spent all their time carousing, I watched as many films as possible while there. ...My Chinese date took me to see a film in Mandarin with English and Cantonese subtitles. We also saw McKenna's Gold with Cantonese subtitles... and most relevant... Hell in the Pacific with Cantonese and English subtitles. In short, I got to understand every comment that Torshiro Mifune uttered. (Spoiler alert...)...Not that it added a great deal to the film. When Mifune's character gets urinated on, he charges in the ocean to wash himself shouting, "Dirty, dirty!" When he gets drunk near the end he expresses his melancholia by singing a dirge, "If I die on the land, I'll be a land corpse, if I die on the sea, I'll be a sea corpse..." Not the best frame of mind to be interrupted by Marvin's character....In short, you didn't miss a lot by being in the same boat as Marvin's character and understanding so little. But the Chinese didn't get it and just slapped on the subtitles... Rhodesia Jim

This war Robinsonade is a quirky poem and a psychological essay, not of an unusual or twisted psychology, on the contrary, a raw one, the two actors were carefully chosen as types of ordinary guys, Mifune and Marvin, both awesome, with Mifune being the superior actor; it reminded me of Russian war movies, the Expressionism exchanged for '60s _avant-gardism and fanciness, where the playfulness, coldness and irony enhance the beauty and the absurd, the two styles resemble in some heartfelt sympathy, yet Boorman reveals a hopelessness and sense of dread and of the absurd. Think of it as of a poem, also because of its masterful unity.Two soldiers torture each other, then cook, then set up a raft and, toilers of the sea, leave the island, towards a larger world unable, unprepared to contain their comradeship, which was uncertain and shaky to begin with, and, born on a wild shore, breaks in the ruins of societal life. They rediscover comfort in a ruined military base on another island: cigars, a magazine, sake. But they drink too much. The drink, the magazine are enough to dispel their newfound, unlikely and strategic unity. They rejoice in the things they find, but foolishly, vainly.The '60s were eager for this naked psychology.They don't know each other's name. Sometimes, their relationship has the abrupt and dizzy quality, with sudden changes and outbursts, found in the '60s and '70s cinema inspired by the stage. Which on stage can look convincing and maybe lifelike, but in a movie looks abrupt, silly and almost contrived.The island, their 1st island, which they leave, is in itself Paradise, and the director is very aware of this pristine beauty.

War is Hell, they tell us (but only when you're on the receiving end...). Boorman's minimalist masterpiece, fully realized with the aid of three of the Art's finest (Mifune, Marvin, and Hall), stands the test of Time. Its message is as clear and as valid today as it was then. Even vastly inferior fare, like the SF feature ENEMY MINE, would go on to "re-imagine" HELL IN THE PACIFIC- though I don't recall the filmmakers giving credit where credit was due at the time of that movie's release (shades of THE TERMINATOR!). Mifune and Marvin make for a marvelous mix, and Conrad Hall's eye for detail is (as it always was, throughout his entire career) unmatched. The alternate ending (which I'd heard about, but have never seen) sounds interesting, but I'd always assumed that Boorman's original ending was even darker: I thought it might've been a drunken hand-to-hand struggle to the death between the two men, in which they both die(d). Either way, HELL IN THE PACIFIC is one of the truly Great Ones. Don't miss it.