Utter trash.

Rating: 1/10 (31 August 2013)

My uncle lived through the Bataan march, and was a POW in a Japanese labor camp. According to his daughter the one comment he made about this movie was as follows;
"*Explicative*, we never had it that good!"
He then reportedly stormed out of the TV room.
You know, I have to say that I saw this film a couple times as a kid, and I never thought much of it. Initially I was going to title my review "Egomania 3" because that's kind of what we have here. The "drama" between the leads is manufactured in the extreme. The squaring off between Guiness and Mifune puts a grim smirk (if you could call it that) on this viewer's face.
The film just doesn't ring true as to what happened to American, British, Australian, New Zealander and even French or Dutch POWs taken by the Japanese. The Imperial Japanese military didn't have the wanton industrial slaughter mechanism of the Nazi regime in Europe, but instead had the "work them until they're dead" ethic derived partially from Bushido, the code of the samurai.
The acting was over the top. The story was so detached from reality as to be insulting, and by that I don't just mean my family's anecdote, but the interviews with survivors who went through that atrocity tell a very different and tragic story. During the Bataan march itself Japanese soldiers routinely shot anyone who looked weak or didn't look like they could make it, or rested. Then, once they got to the camps, it was hell baking in corrugated iron huts, laboring in hot and disease infested regions. And that's just for starters; the treatment, the food, the sheer and utter abuse; NONE of that is in this film.
This film is about Hollywood parading its stars for what some idiot asinine producer thought would be a good patriotic film showing Americans and British being defiant in the face of the odds.
Wrong.
Look, I love Japanese culture. I love the food, I love the movies, I love the clean and polite society, and the people themselves, and I certainly don't hold any grudges whatsoever. In fact I want to retire there. And, I'm not the only one. Therefore, why not make a movie that shows the REAL EXPERIENCE? I can't answer that, but what I do know is that this piece of cinematic trash is just another notch in a southern Californian metroplex film industry that seems to never get anything right when it comes to history.
What's even more insulting is that people have voted it so high as a quality film. Between the Russians not getting credit for their massive effort in what they call "the Great Patriotic War" and people like my family who were there when it happened, it's a wonder the entire film industry hasn't been run out of town and forced to setup shop in Mexico.
Respectably shot, egotistical acting, poor SFX (notably the miniature), and a script that is just so idiotic I can't believe anyone green-lit this thing, it's a film that's definitely got some massive flaws.
If you need to see a WW2 film about the Pacific Theatre, then check out Tora Tora Tora (Tiger Tiger Tiger).
See this movie once, then do your brain a favor and pick up a book on the subject to learn what REALLY happened.