Poignant Crap

Rating: 1/10 (7 May 2010)

I fell asleep in the first 10 minutes of this film. It was so boring that I stopped watching it after the next 15minutes.
Its basically an Anti-war "I hate war" "war is meaningless" sort of film written apparently by Sean Penn.
This sort of theme may perhaps be used for other conflicts - insert your "I hate Bush" diatribe here. Or lets see, WW1 trench warfare.
But the Pacific War was quite different. The Japanese military really were horrible. They slaughtered millions of innocent civilians. The Battle for Guadalcanal was vitally important as it served as a staging post for Japanese bombers to sink Allied ships heading to Australia etc..
There were numerous historical inaccuracies in this movie. The battle scenes were not factually correct.
In short, this film and the story of WW2 only serves to act as a canvas for an anti-war message, and for the director to insert platitudes about the "horrors of war" and about how the Japanese soldiers - the same people who raped an entire city population at Nanking before killing them - were really really nice people.
In short, its a boring, preachy film filled with hippie 3am free form poetry. Watch this if you want to watch an anti-war film. The director might as well have substituted the Japanese soldiers for smurfs.