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The Battle of Okinawa

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The Battle of Okinawa

The Americans are swiftly closing on Okinawa, an island just south of the Japanese mainland. The Imperial command sends top generals and several army divisions to defend it at all costs. The mission quickly degenerates as vital resources and troops are diverted to other islands. After a civilian evacuation ends in tragedy most of non-combatants are forced to remain on the island. Many convert to soldier status. Tokyo sends mixed messages that squander time and resources, as when they order the defenders to build an airstrip for aircraft that never come. The truth soon becomes obvious: the high command decides that the island cannot be held and effectively abandons the Okinawan defenders. When the Americans land many troops are deployed in the wrong places. As the slaughter mounts, a suicidal attitude takes hold. Okinawa becomes a death trap, for civilian volunteers and non-combatants as well.

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Release : 1971
Rating : 6.9
Studio : TOHO, 
Crew : Production Design,  Director of Photography, 
Cast : Keiju Kobayashi Yūzō Kayama Tetsurō Tamba Tatsuya Nakadai Mayumi Ozora
Genre : History War

Cast List

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Reviews

Perry Kate
2021/05/13

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

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Cebalord
2018/08/30

Very best movie i ever watch

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Greenes
2018/08/30

Please don't spend money on this.

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Roxie
2018/08/30

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

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vargas-16
2012/06/29

The film is pretty bad across the board. Even ignoring the poor special effects due to budget, the direction and editing is poor. A tighter script and decent editing would have done wonders for what could have been a good film. The story line is grim, of course, but is badly handled and is an emotionless tale of waste. To get an emotional response from an audience you need to care about the characters, and that empathy is what the movie truly lacks. The film is a docudrama, but lacks drama and the power of a documentary. It's worth a look, but is certainly not a good film. Compare BoO with Story of a Prostitute, Fires on the Plain, or The Burmese Harp, and you'll understand why it is a forgotten film.

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harposkc
2010/10/06

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").

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jeffrey-nimmo-1
2010/03/20

I'm really surprised at the positive reviews this film has received and the high IMDb rating. Reading them at times I wondered if we was watching the same movie. I'm going to have to disagree with the other reviewers and say that the film doesn't work, either historically or dramatically.Historically, it's wildly inaccurate. The whole movie suffers from the need to portray the Japanese in the best possible and most heroic light. A few examples: by April, 1945, the Japanese pilot corps had been almost totally destroyed. The Japanese were unable to train new pilots at the rate they were being killed. This is one reason why they resorted to suicide attacks. And yet we are to believe that large air forces still exist and were not employed in Okinawa because the army was unwilling to attack the American forces and recapture the air fields to the north. Another example is the Yamato. The Japanese Navy in the north had been almost destroyed, and what remained lacked fuel, but the admiralty felt the need to make some sort of gesture and sent their largest battleship. The plan had always been to beach and scuttle the ship on Okinawa and use it as a gun platform, but instead we are told that it's mission was to bravely sail amongst the Americans and fight until it was out of ammo. Unfortunately before she could do that, she was attacked by those dastardly Americans who flew gigantic squadrons of planes against her (100 planes attacking a single ship at once?). What tripe.Unlike movies like "Tora Tora Tora" or "Midway", there is no attempt to personalize or portray the other side as anything but mindless, bloodthirsty automatons. The Americans are shown as surprisingly weak, unable to cope with the Japanese in hand to hand combat, and most of the Japanese appear to die by artillery fire or mowed down by tanks. It's the kind of chauvinism one would expect from a John Wayne movie.Now, I don't expect historical accuracy from a John Wayne movie, but I do expect it to be entertaining. However, this movie is just too confusing and poorly written. Worse of all, it resorts to melodrama. I lost count of how many times women and children were used to manipulate the audience's emotions.All in all, I don't recommend it.

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chaos-rampant
2008/09/23

How do you go about depicting one of the largest and most violent battles of the Pacific Theater of WWII? Is it possible to capture the ugliness and gruesomeness of a battle with 150,000 civilian casualties on celluloid and most important can any depiction by one or the other side be really impartial? The Battle of Okinawa (BOO from now on) succeeds beyond all expectations on the first and better than it has any right to in the second - it doesn't resort to cheap flag-waving but it's not without a sense of patriotism either.The first hour of the film is devoted to the strategic planning of the battle - Kihachi Okamoto however is smart enough to spice up what in lesser hands could have been boring exposition and setup with a breakneck pace that makes this first hour just whiz by. As is obvious from the title, the protagonist in BOO is the battle - and its victims. It's not a character-driven piece as all the main characters are painted in broad strokes but it's a sprawling war drama that takes us in a bloody tour through every pore, nook and cranny of Okinawa - from the shellshocked trenches and battlegrounds to the primitive hospital set up in a cave lacking all necessities and in itself an image of Dante-ish hell on earth, people screaming and passing out and others having their legs amputated with dull hacksaws and nurses trying to ventilate the place so the injured won't suffocate, to women and children and other civilians hudled together in a cave and gas bombed by American troops to the Army headquarters where officers argue for tactics. Nothing is spared by Okamoto's lens - this is literally the battle of Okinawa in all its morbid glory.The credentials of the creative team should be the final guarantee that BOO is a movie well worth seeing. Directed by Kihachi Okamoto (SWORD OF DOOM, KIRU, RED LION) and written by Kaneto Shindo (ONIBABA, KURONEKO) and with Tatsuya Nakadai and Tetsuro Tamba spearheading the cast, you really can't go wrong here. It's as bleak and nihilistic as Okamoto's previous chambara output would suggest and not an easy watch for the squeamish - but therein lies the true power of the movie. Even when it resorts to images we might consider trite by now (a little child walking through dozens of corpses in the aftermath of the battle) it's still done with conviction that is true to story and setting.If we have become jaded by all the images of war and suffering the news networks have only been too eager to churn out and exploit for our curious eyes, war and suffering has lost none of its potency. BOO is not an impartial depiction of the battle - how could it be? It's not a documentary anyway. The patriotism and self-sacrifice of Japanese troops (a form of seppuku in itself) must have made eyes in Tokyo, Hiroshima and Kyoto glisten with tears. Is it not understandable though? Okamoto is not carried away with sentimentality though - this is a slice of war brutality and comes with arms chopped and parents killing their children so they won't fall in enemy hands.

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