Highly Overrated But Still Good

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

STAY AWAY FROM THIS FILM! What can I say, there are so many things wrong with it, for starters its 4.5 hours long, half of it maybe even more is completely pointless just boring shots of different angles with no talking Sound effects, I don't care what they use but my god THEY USED THE SAME SOUND EFFECT OVER AND OVER again for when bodies were flopped around and when people jumped and landed, it was the same sound over and over again and it was a sound that I used for cheap homemade films almost a decade ago, trust me this makes the experience feel so cheap.The narration, the narration was extremely annoying because about half of what the narrator was saying I couldn't understand or hear, either because the music background and repeated sound effects were too loud or his voice was just too low at times, the quality of the narration changes randomly too which also makes it even harder to hear.Im pretty sure that a lot of the torture they showed in this film wasn't true, like making the prisoners have sex with each other? or the cockroach thing that was retarded.The ONLY thing that makes this film good is the very convincing experiments they were well done and looked very real. But thats the problem Im not looking to watch disgusting things when everything else is pure garbage, I wanted to watch a good doc that explained very well the history of what happened, they might of explained it but still all the things that are wrong with this film make it to crappy and poor to even pay attention.

The small portions of this movie that have any merit, mostly the archival footage which is in some cases quite well applied, are over shadowed by a number of glaring flaws. The narrator blatantly overlooks other widespread abuses and atrocities committed by the whole of the Japanese military, instead claiming that any injustices were simply in response to pressures from the conflict with Russia. To try and whitewash Unit 731's role as a defencive measure is historically inaccurate, and since the Philosophy of a Knife claims to be a sober look at historical events, it fails on that level. I would say while there are few other movies that focus primarily on Imperial Japan's forays into chemical and biological warfare, this one does not ear points for filling a niche void.

This epic is 4 hours long. Much of that 4 hours is the exterior of a building which may or may not be the one in question. In a prologue the director and I think one of the producers tell us, among other things, that they "did not research" a lot of the facts.But they say their work is based on facts and that the movie is supposed to be about death and war....There is a fair amount of interesting stuff in the movie, enough for maybe 90 minutes. But not 4 hours. I think they wanted to give the viewer some sense of ennui by showing the building the falling snow from this angle, from that angle, from another angle...all with no narration over and over. It seemed like about 2 minutes of story and 5 minutes of exterior of building in the falling snow for 4 hours.I may be exaggerating, but not much. As for the story....Those who know about Unit 731 may be offended by this film as an effort to cash in on a grisly reputation. Others may be offended by it's portrayal of one American and several Russians as the victims of Unit 731. I am pretty sure the majority of victims were a very diverse group consisting of P.O.W.s from all who fought against Japan, Chinese locals and even Japanese criminals. Pregnant women as well as children were also prey to the heinous Japanese "doctors" of Unit 731.Regardless, the whole thing to me comes off as lame bondage/torture-porn. That you MIGHT get some idea of a story out of if you take notes when they are actually speaking. Even if you are looking for Bondage/toture-porn keep the remote handy, you have a lot of the building in the falling snow from this angle, from that angle, from another angle...all with no narration over and over to fast forward through.

As soon as I heard about this film I snagged a copy and watched it in all it's atrocious glory! I love Iskanov's work and I knew that he would do an incredible job with this subject.I had seen other films about Unit 731 and had been unimpressed. They always seemed to come off campy or simply lacked the seriousness of the subject. Iskanov's film does the subject justice and then some (but the film is not overdone...all 4-1/2 hours of it).In fact Iskanov captures the true horror of it all by simply reducing it to what it is...torture. Iskanov, although known for his visual sensory overload (in a good way), shows the restraint and control of a world-class director.There aren't a whole lot of films made about the atrocities of Japanese unit 731 and this one is not likely to be topped.Watch this film with caution as it will change your life, if even just slightly.