Reviews

I found the movie a bit slow paced, but then it's supposed to be a drama about Churchill, not a war movie.

What I really found unacceptable was how bumbling they made him look. Churchill made a lot of mistakes, but he was making huge numbers of critical decisions. They don't show him conferring with generals, and trying to get actions taken, deciding how many planes they could afford to allocate to France and how many they would need to hold back to defend England. It wasn't just Dunkirk, many of his decisions were vital to the war effort. He repeatedly tried to get the French to withdraw and keep fighting, to fight house to house in Paris, to retreat to North Africa and keep fighting. He tasked subordinates to organize the economy for war, to prioritize different kinds of equipment, to organize the home guard.

Churchill was an energetic leader, and was not afraid to make decisions, even knowing that they would result in the death of a lot of people. And he was forced to make such decisions repeatedly. This is a man who had to decide to allow people in Coventry to be bombed rather than give up the secret of Ultra, and he did it.

This movie makes it seem like he was just a drunk who got lucky with one idea, and that is a very unfair depiction.

The acting is fantastic. Gary Oldman is terrific. And individual scenes are fine -- it's only the whole that leaves the wrong impression.

There are two things about this movie that make it more than a little absurd. Of course US movies tell the US perspective, and Japanese movies will tend to tell theirs. But Japan does not even teach what happened in World War II, no one growing up after the war has ever been taught what they did to the subjects under their rule, or that they started hostilities. This is why China and Korea to this day maintain a cold peace with Japan. They have not forgotten.

So this movie once again skips over anything -- Japanese perspective or not -- about the war, and focuses on the only thing Japan has ever focused on since -- their own suffering.

The other thing is that the fight scenes make it look like they are at least making the US pay a heavy price. This is typical Japanese face- saving. If you are going to make a movie about these dead heroes to the state, you have to at least make it look like they died being somewhat competent. In fact, the count for the day was something like 10 US planes downed, and 14 pilots wounded. Considering that 4000 Japanese sailors died, this was an incredibly lopsided fight. So in other words, the battle must have looked very, very different than this movie.

I understand that a Japanese director probably cannot make a movie in which Japanese sailors are dying by the thousands -- and ARE NOT EVEN ABLE to inflict much damage in return. But that isn't US propaganda -- that is what happened. Surely at this point, it's time for someone to tell the young people of Japan something closer to the truth? Yes, Japan paid for its mistake, but it was not an innocent victim.

In 2001 I taught for six weeks in Japan, 2 weeks before, then later 4 weeks after 9/11. My students incredulously asked me in amazement "who would think of using an airplane as a suicide weapon and killing themselves and lots of other people?" They had not even HEARD of kamikazes! I did not have the heart to enlighten them, so I restrained my natural response "Your people invented this!"

Modern pacifist Japan is rooted in ignorance, and this movie contributes nothing to understanding. This is the telling of a war that happened in another dimension, not here. This is a tale from a Japan that still cannot own up to its own history.

It's rare to find a movie that rates itself. About 20 minutes in, there was a line about meandering around without a goal. That's what the movie is all about. It meanders around the Tuscan countryside, spouting a lot of French deep thought, doing absolutely nothing. Reviewers who find the movie good talk about what the movie is trying to achieve, but the bottom line is that none of the motion is relevant to the supposed "story" and most of the talk are irrelevant as well. You could have treated the pathetic topic in a 10 minute short, which would still be boring, but at least would be more merciful.

This movie felt as long as Titanic in its way, but there was no iceberg to root for. I stopped by the Lincoln Lawyer while waiting for my wife to leave and watched a motor cycle gang beat someone up, reflecting that it would be really sweet if they did the same thing in the other movie, or perhaps to the actors and director, to make sure they don't do this again.