Never will war be exposed enough

Rating: 10/10 (11 May 2008)

Another film on the US-Japan war in the Pacific, will you say. Of course, you'd be right but of course you are wrong. It is a film about any war waged by the US in any foreign country. That's the first point and it reveals so clearly the absurdity of the tactical thinking of some officers who see the war they are taking part in as a springboard for their egotistic self-satisfied career, and their men are nothing but pawns that have to be moved, by force most of the time, and not the force of rational arguments. Hence, if you have a bunker at the top of a hill, you do not go around to attack it from the flank or even from behind. You just run up the bare slope of that hill under the fire of their machine guns, and you take it. The men must do that. The commanding officer will of course go last, and most probably will come last to certify the work of the men. The second element is that this film shows how the minds of the soldiers still go on and they mix news from home and the famous letters from their wives who are asking for a divorce, and secretly hoping that will not be necessary. And the film reveals how deep the breach, the cut, the rip, or even the abyss is between life on the front and life back home, between the present and what is and can only be the past. Life back home has no future as long as the war goes on. The film is an absolutely fascinating denunciation of the psychological but also spiritual destruction a war is for any soldier who is de-structured and will have to rebuild his own personal psyche, structure, social being, human being, life in one word, afterwards. Third, the film shows the ugliness of war, the dirt, the blood, the din or even the blaring roaring noise, the mud, the physical suffering and death in the name of the fatherland or the motherland, the physical torture that is imposed onto you, that you impose onto yourself, or that you impose onto the others. The best example is how a captain who resisted the silly order of the colonel and whose resistance is shown as perfectly sane since it brings victory and the economy of a few deaths, is nevertheless sent back to the US, with a medal, but in the most disgraceful way: to get him out of the tramping feet of the colonel who is a pure fascist. All in all this film applies to the second world war the discourse we are used to hearing about the Vietnam war and it convincingly shows that all wars are bad, inhuman, inhumane, purely non-human, cruel, absurd, and probably aimless. It could and anyway should have been avoided. A war is for each soldier a loss of virginity, purity, happiness, promised rewards. "They want you to die or to lie with them." And that's all. That bunch of killing, deadly, fatal, lethal lies lead the soldier to looking for another dimension in the world, some god, transcending force that can wrap you up in its arms in a totally sexless and purely spiritual comforting gesture that makes you go on, on the war path of the limited political ambitions of those who govern us. In a war there is no power of the people, for the people and by the people but only power of the politicians for themselves and by themselves. A war, any war is a total loss of freedom.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines