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Strong and Moving!

Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

In the last months of the Pacific War Private Tamura of the Japanese Imperial Army is told to report to hospital . If the hospital refuses him a bed he is to commit suicide . He arrives at hospital and told that walking wounded aren't considered casualties and will not be treated . As he plans his next move the hospital comes under bombardment As soon as I saw the opening sequence of this movie I was instantly reminded of the classic Japanese trilogy THE HUMAN CONDITION which was released at the same time . Both films centre around a Japanese soldier who finds himself a member of a beaten army caught in both the unforgiving wilderness and in circumstances they have no control over . As you might expect from a Japanese film from this period it's beautifully framed and has breath taking cinematography and on a visual level comes lose to the old cliché that " once seen never ever forgotten but like THE HUMAN CONDITION there is a considerable problem with the story telling and like Kaji in that trilogy one has a problem believing in Tamura as a real person though for slightly different reasons It is noticeable that even commentators who have praised the film on this page have pointed out something and that is the rather clumsy exposition the film constantly uses . Tamura's platoon leader gives Tamura a long winded explanation on what has happened in the events leading up the opening scene even though Tamura would be fully aware of all this . We get scenes of someone lying dead and someone feels the need to point out that they're even though it's obvious to the audience and not only does Tamura feel the need to point out that someone is dead he also exclaims " Japanese soldiers " to himself when he sees some Japanese soldiers .Some movies suffer from not following the rule " show don't tell " but this film feels the need to show and tell both at the same time . Not to be too ungenerous a lot of war films at this time also suffered from this most especially the British film DUNKIRK where each and every character spouts real life events in the same manner as a history professor would If you stop to think about it , and believe me you don't need to think too hard about it , would there be any need for Tamura to be sent to hospital ? After all his platoon are prepared to fight to the last man and the Americans aren't too far away so why bother sending him to the hospital if he's expected to die very soon ? This is a clumsy plot device to set up an excuse for Tamura to carry the story through to its conclusion . Tamura doesn't really come across as a human being , more as a literary device to be caught up in brutal and harrowing situations . Make no mistake this is sometimes a brutal and genuinely harrowing film and despite being wonderfully shot and containing impressive technical merits it's perhaps a bit too contrived and implausible to be called a true classic of World cinema

So few films deserve the designation of "Masterpiece" For me, this finely-honed, abrasive immersion in war is one of the few. It is brutal and unrelenting, it is bluntly sincere in intent, and brilliantly depicts the depths of degradation the human condition can reach when immersed in the killing fields.Fires On The Plain is, in no way, a pleasant film, and if you're one who desires a "good guys versus bad guys" with a triumphant ending, look elsewhere. Director Ichikawa has seen first-hand the results of mass killing, and his bleak black-and-white composition stands as a persuasive caution to those who still believe in the brutality of battle to solve man's continuing hostility to his own kind--that the acting is consistently compelling and the photography stunning does not detract from the ultimate message. Not recommended as entertainment of a light kind, but as a compelling vision of a holocaust.

A harrowing masterpiece on the sheer madness and despair of war, Fires on the Plain (Nobi) is not going to be to everybody's taste: this is a war movie in the truest possible sense of the term, one that resorts neither to flag-waving patriotism nor saccharine sentimentality. Nobi cuts deep, it's ugly, tenebrous and bleak as few things ever committed on celluloid will ever be. This is war behind the cannons, with no triumphs or heroes, no moral victories or defeats to be had, just a handful of gaunt and terrible-looking men strewn across a land ravaged by war like penitents fleeing a great disaster. The characters defy moral judgment because they are creatures beset by a great woe, a woe that does not permit questions of a moral nature. War and survival. Pitting one's will against the other's in a battlefield arena. The loser is simply removed from existence.Tamura, soldier in the Japanese Imperial army, is discharged from his platoon and ordered to report in a nearby hospital on account of him coughing blood and being disliked by the rest of the platoon. He's told to never come back and instead commit suicide by hand grenade in case the hospital rejects him. Which it does. The hospital is nothing but a shack made of wooden planks and the hospital surgeon simply tells him that if he's capable of walking he's just fine. It is in that shabby excuse of a hospital that one of the most harrowing scenes of the film takes place. As the area is carpet bombed by American planes the doctors and those who can walk and sustain themselves flee from the hospital and into the woods. Moments before the hospital is blown to pieces, the gaunt and crippled figures of the sick and injured crawl out of it in every manner of posture, dressed in their sickly white robes, as if the building is some kind of beast spewing viscera and filth out upon the earth.That is Nobi's greatest success; the stark and brooding depiction of the suffering of war in simple but evocative images, without melodrama or pseudo-heroism. Soldiers cross a marsh, wading knee-deep in mud, move across the opposite bank and into a field only to discover enemy tanks hiding in the woods, their lights shining like malignant eyes as they scan the dark. A procession of injured soldiers, dirty and half-mad, crossing a road, dropping to the ground on the sound of enemy planes. Buzzards feasting on a pile of dead bodies. An abandoned village. A mad soldier that believes himself to be Buddha sitting under a tree, covered with flies and his own excrement, offering his arm to be eaten by Tamura when he's dead. These are the images Kon Ichikawa conjures for our eyes, merciless and unflinching in their poignancy but honest and raw.Nobi doesn't rush to get somewhere. It is content to follow Tamura's travels through the war-torn land as he tries to reach the regrouping center of Palompa, and observe the madness and obscenities of war. The movie wades through the sludge of the horror of war, slow and brooding, just like the characters it follows. The final thirty minutes with Tamura taking refuge with two deserters who feed on 'monkey meat' are the closest Nobi comes to adhering to conventional narratives and they're no less powerful for that matter. Strikingly photographed in black and white, with great performances from the cast, and Ichikawa's assured direction, Nobi is not only among the best war movies to be made but also among the finest of Japanese cinema.

The title is a reference to the destruction of the remnants of a harvest, like rice husks, by farmers who burn them creating fires on the plains. This is a bleak tale of the destruction of the Japanese soldier.The story is set in the closing days of the Philippines campaign as a soldier with TB who returns from a hospital because since he can walk, they have no room for him. His superior officers don't want him around since he's really too sick to work or fight. Abused by his officer he's sent back to the hospital with orders to either be admitted or kill himself. They still won't take him and he's soon left to wander across the war ravaged landscape trying to find help or a place to stay or even just food. Its a bleak journey with no hope in sight and only death and man's inhumanity to man at every turn.Billed as a harrowing journey into the dark heart of man and war this is also a very funny movie. This isn't to say its not horrifying, it is at times, but its also darkly comic. How could it not be? Here is a film where madness and insanity run rampant, people are constantly trying to hustle tobacco leaves for food, trying to get even a slightly better pair of shoes, trying to remain a Japanese soldier in the face of absurdity by marching constantly but never getting anywhere and you can't help but laugh. To be sure things go darker as it becomes clear that cannibalism maybe, literally and figuratively, the only way to survive, but at the same time there is something uncomfortably funny about the human comedy.Hailed as a great anti-war film its stark photographic style makes clear the insanity of war even as it dazzles our eye with its beauty. Here we see landscapes full of bodies that include the soldier and the civilian. set amid fields forests and trees that would otherwise be, and to some extent still are, quite beautiful. Its a jarring sensation.What intriguing is that I read that this is based on a novel about the redemptive power of Christianity. The director removed all over the religious references to hope and salvation and instead used it as to show that life stinks, war stinks worse and that there is, ultimately no hope.Intellectually I admire the film, emotionally I don't. Part of it is a strident downbeat score which, for me over accentuates what we are seeing on the screen. Its almost gilding the lily since the imagery is so strong it doesn't really need to have the music force you into feeling one way or another.Is it a great film, thats for you to decide. For certain its unlike any other war film, bloody, horrific and real in ways that big budgeted films claim to be but never are. This is not for those adverse to blood and gore since its here in spades.Definitely worth a look.