Mifune portrays a man literally driven mad by his fear of impending nuclear doom. But the dentist, recognizing that Mifune is paralyzed by fear, also recognizes a core of sanity in his soul. But, again, Kurosawa's cinema provides the most cogent examples, even if less artistically compelling ones in recent years. Again, Kurosawa does not deal directly with atomic warfare, but rather, in one section, with nuclear disaster, and in another, postnuclear horrors. Though the Japanese film has no titles for each dream section, the U.S. release does.
Special effects predominate and the segment is preachy in the extreme.
The film focuses on a survivor of Nagasaki, which has its own mythic dimension in Japan, and is concerned with the subject of survivor guilt, the bomb's legacy, memory, and how to pass on the bomb's lessons to a new, Americanized generation. A hardening of Kurosawa's stylistic arteries mars the film's good intentions and powerful performances. In recent years, outside of Kurosawa's cinema, the task of explicating the nuclear horror for the Japanese has fallen to Imamura's Black Rain , an artistically successful and intellectually compelling adaptation of Ibuse Masuji's hugely respected novel of the same title. A crucial component of Ibuse's novel is the main protagonist's knowledge of traditional Japanese culture exemplified by his following local customs and folk beliefs, not to mention the tradition of the patriarchal family structure and the arranged marriage. In the film, the added character of a local shamaness, who clearly represents both the arational world of mysticism and the traditional folk beliefs of rural Japan, stands as a juxtaposition to Shigematsu, the protagonist, and his attempted dispassionate examination of the bomb experience.