An action-packed slog

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

I bought this movie for a higher price than i'd care to admit, expecting a interesting take on the Battle of Okinawa with real facts and maybe some cool battle scenes. I was extremely disappointed. Over the entire movie we are presented with the spiritually pure Japanese angels desperately fighting against those American Yankee murderers that only win the battle because they have unlimited ammo hack Thompson's that they spray and pray without discrimination, as well as some obligatory war crime weapons like chemical bombs. Which as a reviewer before mentioned was not even in use during the Okinawa invasion. I at the same time understand and hate the decision by movie-makers to portray ones own side in a better light than the other. But deliberately making your own side seem so good as it was presented in this movie is borderline historical revisionism. Which is a curse word in my dictionary. One thing that irked me: Okinawan's were treated like trash by the Japanese during the actual invasion, yet here we are presented with Okinawan civilians that gets denied the great honor of joining the mass suicide of the Japanese soldiers, but eventually after proving their spirit the Japanese soldiers kindly allow them to use one of their grenades to off themselves. I have no doubts that some Okinawan's wanted to willingly kill themselves, but mainly the Okinawan's actually wanted to surrender to the Americans due to how crappy the Japanese treated them, using them as human shields and deliberately forcing them to kill themselves.Also the combat scenes themselves mainly consists of the Japanese soldiers trying to get stabby stabby while the Americans use 2000 bullets on each of the Japanese in return. There is a lot of gore and blood everywhere, but it comes off as fake and stupid with the bad fighting choreography and the random narrator commenting on how "glorious" the Japanese defenders were. I suspect the Japanese ultra-nationalists welcome this movie's inaccuracy, but at the same time it also fails as a entertaining movie. The document mixed with the bad acting makes this entire ordeal seem like a lifeless propaganda film that i could easily imagine being created by the actual WW2 Japanese government. That this was actually created 20 years afterwards is astonishing to me. The history is not actually completely wrong, it is just glaced with lies to make it seem factual. That makes this the worst attempt at propaganda i have ever seen. And i hope that whoever Japanese director that wrote the line "this is the best war movie ever made" which made me buy the movie will be forced to watch Fires on the plain, letters of Iwo Jima or Stalingrad so he can see an actual good war movie and how pointless war actually is. Man i could go on and on about how bad this movie is To sum it up, this is a stupid jingoistic and historically wrong document movie with many horrible combat scenes.

From the director of the terrific "Japan's Longest Day", this is an ambitious documentary-styled recreation of the battle for Okinawa, where hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians were abandoned by the Japanese military in order to better protect the mainland. The soldiers fortified themselves in caves and fended of an overwhelming American attack over a period of several months. Unfortunately, the filmmaker's talents don't match their ambitions. "Japan's Longest Day" was a fascinating film written by Shinobu Hashimoto about a little known military revolt at the end of the war. Okinawa is dramatically inept with misplaced bits of humor, and the crowd scenes never number more than 50, making it seem far less epic than it purports to be. The photography is bland and the blood very fake. The desperation never seeps in like it should, but the film does a good job of showing what they went through. It also shows that when the going gets tough, the Japanese commit suicide - according to this film it must have been the leading cause of death. The events depicted are similar to "Sands of Iwo Jima" - so if you like that you might like this. Okinawa is still occupied by American forces. Script by Kaneto Shindo ("Onibaba").

I have a desire to look deeply into films from 1971 and came upon this oddity which is on R1 DVD, but still pretty much unknown. It is directed by Kihachi Okamoto who was a versatile director, happy directing comedy alongside such far as Dai-bosatsu tôge / Sword of Doom (1966), perhaps the greatest chambara movie going. As well as that The Battle of Okinawa stars Tetsurô Tanba and Tatsuya Nakadai, the two most famous Japanese actors of a generation disregarding Mifune. No slouch at directing himself (Onibaba, Kuroneko) Kaneto Shindô was involved in writing the script. So there's pedigree aplenty for the movie.The Battle of Okinawa ended very shortly before the atomic bombings ended the entire conflict in the Pacific. It was a battle of cataclysmic ferocity that accounted for the lives of a quarter of a million people, which included a third of the island's civilian population. It was almost the end of a civilisation and a way of life, Okinawans having a distinctive culture that was almost obliterated here. The Americans never left, almost a fifth of the island is still occupied by US military bases.The movie is both educational on the tactical side of the battle, but also revelatory about Japanese culture of the time. The military triumvirate on the Japanese side consisted of General Ushijima, and his two subordinates Lieutenant General Isamu Cho (Tanba) and Colonel Hiromichi Yahara (Nakadai). Ushijima is an almost catatonic buddha who admits having inferior tactical knowledge and so chooses sides in arguments between Cho and Yahara. Cho tends to favour aggression, Yahara is always more moderate. Nakadai here wears the same expression on his face all the way through the movie, maybe he grimaced and the wind changed, for he wore it all the way through Hideo Gosha's great movie The Wolves, also released in 1971. Joking aside though it's an iconic expression, which is awesomely fatalistic, seeming in one go to express the sheer lunacy of the pro-imperial attitudes in the army, and the desire to die. Yahara's appears to be the greatest lunacy though, he opts to let the American forces land unopposed in order to conserve ammunition, which would be needed for later in the battle.There are many terrible things that happened during the battle, so many families committed suicide in order to avoid contact with the American troops. It's still a point of controversy as to how willing they were, and how much they were forced to by the army. Families gathered round in circles and unpinned grenades, the survivors attempted to batter each other out of their misery. Quite spectacular suicide missions are commemorated. For example a plane landing in a US-controlled airfield (the rest of the squadron succumbing to anti-aircraft fire), troops disembarking and throwing grenades at the US planes, entirely without hope of surviving It's quite interesting to discuss whether the movie glorified the resistance, certainly suicide missions are shown as heroic, whilst entirely unpalatable to the Western eye, but also the movie does question whether there is more to life, a greater reason to live than merely to serve the Emperor.Some disappointments from a cinematic point of view, firstly the archive footage that announces the film is shot in 4:3 but here massively stretched to 2.35:1, which looks pretty sloppy. Then the film is not very well budgeted I feel so the action often looks kind of fake, but also there wasn't enough cash in the kitty to get Americans over, so the American soldiers (who generally hide their faces, are seen from behind or in the distance) are played by Japanese as well. Luckily we don't see Americans very often, their presence is only known via artillery bombardment, and when we do it's not Thompson sub-machine-guns that they're carrying. Actual combat scenes are very stylised and reminiscent of jidai-geki such as Ran in the way that the platoons of soldiers behave. It's fortunate that the Americans don't play a part in the movie, to the defenders on Okinawa they may as well have been Martians, the issues here were all Japanese, about what attitude to take in the face of cultural destruction and overwhelming incursion. That's not to downplay the loss of American life, but that would simply be for another movie.I felt in the end that the film was a fitting testament to the deaths of the defenders of Okinawa and the populace. The movie kind of captures an essence of bravery, lunacy and hollow childlike subservience, as well as the sheer devastating horror.

Battle of Okinawa is a film directed by the now legendary Kihachi Okamoto. It stars Tatsuya Nakadai and Tetsuro "I'm in every Japanese film" Tamba. Both show off their acting chops in this film and deliver outstanding performances. Don't get me wrong though, there are dozens of actors in this film with almost equal scream time as these two men. This is definitely an ensemble piece on one of the most gruesome slaughters on the Japanese armies front. This film is not easy to watch. It is much more violent than "Letters From Iwo Jima" and as in "Iwo" we see how fanatical the Japanese army was at this point in history. Being taken prisoner was not an option and losing meant death or forever living in dishonor. This notion is even implemented to civilians who in this move kill themselves in droves. Tatsuya Nakadai's character is one of the few characters who believes that suicide in not the only option in defeat. He is the western voice in the film for his character even studied in America. This is a hard core war film that takes no prisoners. I recommend you go out and buy this film for it is now available in R1 DVD thanks to the fine folks at AnimEigo.