Not your average war film and well worth seeing!

Rating: 9/10 (2 May 2005)

There really is no comparisons with SPR except simplistic observations of the WW2 setting, and that the characters were soldiers. SPR was like a war version of Titanic, it may have been cute, popular and profitable, but it was far from art and hardly a film to inspired further thought, however that said, 'further thought' may not be the thing you look for in a film which of course is fine.
The first thing to consider is that the disorientation of characters both in their portrayal and the audience interaction with them is very deliberate. War is indiscriminate, characters regardless of status are culled, nameless, and faceless and with no regard for the individual. The cameo roles of big names arrive unannounced, portray small seemingly insignificant characters only to exit just as unannounced. This juxtaposes our movie audience concept of vanity and popularism and with the dirt, *beep* and blood and death of the events portrayed.
The viewer is drawn in to the character development only to have the character snatched away, thus we are prevented from building a comforting relationship of perspective, we fail to know the individual and their deaths seem all the more pointless, we feel jilted like the death of a relative we hardly knew but wish we had spent more time with.
The characters I suspect are meant to be confused because in wars confusion and death are the only constant, we see the soldiers as slabs of meat, lambs to the slaughter, victims of militarism and hierarchy, sacrificed to ego and vainglorious patriotic pride. "This great evil--where's it come from? How'd it steal into the world? What seed, what root did it grow from? Who's doing this? Who's killing us" The cut away to the helpless naked bird fallen from the nest we wonder did it fall? Was it pushed from the nest?..are we are all pushed from the nest?? In our empathy we feel the certainty of all death and the pathetic nature of living existence.
This film also comments on our perceptions of god, nation and race. Religion seems a vain and self-indulgent luxury, oddly out of place amid the aimless killing, the mayhem and futility. The grassy slope (shot near Port Douglas in OZ BTW) becomes a canvass on which all our preconceptions of war and humanity are put to the sword, the bunker merely an object of temporary ambition and conquest, a hole in the ground on a desolate hill on a remote island that in time will wash away to become still again but for the wind in the grass i.e. "he marched them up the to top of the hill and he marched them down again". And when at last we reach the climatic conquest of the hill, we seek an enemy on whom to vent your rage. And instead we feel their hopelessness, their suffering, loss and grief All of them stripped of nationalism and race as pathetic pawns in some meaningless game, what is a hero, what is an enemy? What really is the difference between us and them?
The disembodied buried face of the dead Japanese soldier staring up into space, "Are you righteous, kind? Does your confidence lie in this? Are you loved by all? Know that I was, too. Do you imagine your sufferings will be less because you loved goodness, truth?" the shell-shocked youth crying in a fetal position, what we held as our hero's committing acts of senseless killing, summary execution and the wrenching gold teeth from the dead and dying.
For all the stark elements of the TTRL, all the stripping bare of our preconceptions and prejudice, it is a story of renewal and hope. In the cutting down of artificial difference, the dismembering of the hollow constructs of religious belief, of race, ideology, nation and rank, the ultimate message is that our fragile mortality is the great leveler and that death knows no ideology. The cutaway at the end to the coconut somehow managing to put down roots on a desolate beach, the sound of the singing of island children and the panoramic shots of nature and it's timeless persistence.
Visually the cinematography was fantastic, though I felt some parts were overly drawn out and could afford to have trimmed, if only because some of it seeming to languish without reason or significance, but the rich color, the framing and the film stock were a stand out. Well worth seeing!