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This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

Absolutely amazing

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

A very Japanese movie with Japanese sensibilities. The special effects were good, but wrapped around a movie that appeared to have been filmed in a warehouse district half the time and on a paper mache island the other half. Hokey dialog dubbing, American servicemen cheering the breathless announcement of an aircraft able to defeat the Zero (while wearing muttonchops, long hair and moustaches), etc., etc. I could go on, but this is like watching a train wreck; you just can't keep your eyes off the inevitable disaster this movie is. At least there is no attempt at pomposity disguised as grandeur that was Pearl Harbor. At least the film maker's attempt is an honest one; one that is silly to a western audience, but a serious attempt nonetheless. If given the choice of watching the Michael Bay version of Pearl Harbor-lite and this, I'll watch this.

I first came across this movie several years ago, with the English title of "Zero Fighter." My opinion is, all things considered, it is not a bad war movie. It is one of the first I've seen that tells the tale of WWII from the Japanese side. Of course the special effects were decidedly Japanese, spectacular and pretty obviously faked. Still, they worked to convey the story. I wish I could find this on video tape, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

...in that the same studio (Toho) and the same special effects people made this epic along with the Gojira movies, so you almost expect the big green guy to make a showing. Part docudrama, part action film, "Zerosen moyu" tells the story of the Japanese Navy's (in)famous Mitsubishi Zero fighter through the lives of an ace pilot and a ground crew member. Hamada (the ace) suffers from the worst dubbed voice of any Japanese film; not even the "monster boys" sound as obnoxious. Mitsushimi, the armorer/mechanic sounds weirdly British, and the dialogue seems to have been written for laughs. But back to the "story." We first run across the duo running away from the Navy flight training school, tired of the getting beaten up for minor infractions. They are stopped, however, by a naval officer who then shows them the prototype of the Zero (named after the then-supposed 2700 years of Japanese national unity), and afterward he makes one of those standard pep talks you always see AWOL boot campers getting in the movies. Our young men, clad in the dorkiest sailor suits ever, agree to stay. Mitsushimi washes out of flight school and becomes a fighter mechanic, while Hamada graduates early (Japanese flight training took three to four years, a useless factoid I know.) Although he is the best in his class, Hamada never is assigned to a carrier wing (the budget was probably too small to build a fake carrier), and instead spends his naval career on Rabul after the island is taken. Improbably, Mitsushimi is his mechanic. From then on it's action, action, action as the Zeros shoot down anything the Americans send up, though the losses get to wear on Hamada. After the battle of Midway, the mechanic goes back to Japan for more training, and runs across a girl, thus beginning the goofy romantic sub-plot always seen in aviator movies. The war grinds on, as Hamada gets the chance to fumble the ball in defending Admiral Yamamoto's plane, and navy brass back in Tokyo argue about upgrading the Zero's paper thin armor (the vote is nay.) By 1943 or 1944 Hamada is badly burned after his Zero is shot down, and visits the family farm outside of Yokohama on hospital leave. He is accompanied by that same wistfull harmonica playing Kurosawa used in "Dodes' ka-den." The scene where he sees his mother tries to be a tear jerker, but only winds up maudlin. When Mitsushima sees Hamada's charred but still-usable hands, and hears that he still wishes to fly, he tries to get the girl to love him because he knows Hamada has a death wish. The forced romance (shown in a collage, with a nightclub singer crooning in the backround!) is a failure, and Hamada keeps on flying to the end, where he is blown out of the sky by US Navy Hellcat fighters. After Japan's surrender, Mitsushima asks his commander for a Zero, and in an odd ceremony the plane is set on fire while idling on the tarmac as pilots and groundcrewmen sob their guts out, hence the title "Zero on Fire".What hurts "Zero" (as it was known here) besides the awful dubbing and the by-the-numbers story, are the technical inaccuracies. There are few flyable Zeros left, so Toho had to build full sized scale models for their actor to sit in. The problem is that the Zero evolved as the war went on, with each new model (and there were five) sporting different wings, engines, and numbers of guns. However, if we are to believe "Zero", nothing changed from 1939 to 1945, because their models are all A6M2s, the type first seen at Pearl Harbor. Squadron markings are also wrong, with late war unit codes used throught the movie. American planes are misnamed, with the F4U Corsair becoming the "F4A Corvair," and the B-29 Superfortress becoming the "Super Flying Fortress." In a scene where US Navy pilots are briefed about the capabilities of a captured Zero, all the people wearing eyeglasses are wearing contemporary fashions and there is a black pilot in the audience. There were no black pilots flying for the Navy in the Pacific theater in World War II. More obvious are the trucks used by the Japanese Navy; all of them are late 1970's Nissans. Oddly enough there are period trucks in the background, but none of them move. In summary, that goofy B-17 movie "Memphis Belle" was more realistic. Watch "Tora! Tora! Tora!" instead.