Tora! Tora! Tora!

This film is great. Thanks to the fact that both sides of the conflict took part in the production, a captivating feature "almost-documentary" with a very nice technical design was created. The battle passages are excellent, clear, convincing, decorated with the bold work of a camera that is ahead of its time (those shaky hand-held "in-action" shots really surprised me). The dialogues are matter-of-fact, they lack pathos and the film does not end with insulting fanfares of American patriots, but succinctly with a speech by Admiral Yamamoto, who studied in the USA. The documentary value is reinforced by the non-hidden reference to the inability of US military forces to respond flexibly to secret service warnings and pure-blooded chaos in the ranks of the defenders (the brave black man behind Arizona's anti-aircraft machine gun in this context is indeed a fragmentary documentary of its time). As a former passionate consumer of Hubáček's non-fiction, I have to praise Tora! Tora! Tora! for its exact reconstruction, which far preceded its time by the absence of pathos and nationalist symbolism. Contemporary Hollywood cinema seems to be returning to the stupid war pathos of the 1950s... (11/12/2006)

After a very long time, I returned to Chuichi Nagumo today and  I once again confirmed my opinion that this film by a Japanese-American director triumvirate made over fifty years ago will probably never be surpassed. Why do I think this? Because the creators achieved a similar result with just a few modified airplanes and some models as the British in Battle of Britain (1969). Of course, there were a number of inaccuracies. I couldn't help but notice the American influence, especially in the scenes strongly colored with patriotism (the battle of two P-40s against Italian Zeros was nice to look at, but it wasn't exactly realistic because Nippon was at its peak in 1941 not only in terms of the quality of its aircraft but mainly in terms of the quality of its aviators, who had already accomplished something by that time). I am not one of those who believe in conspiracy theories, but in the case of Pearl Harbor, I smell a betrayal. What I know is that President Roosevelt wanted to support the European (specifically British) fight against the Third Reich, but public opinion, and consequently legislators, were against it. There were a number of Japanese war provocations, the most conspicuous of which was the sinking of the gunboat Panay. Legislators refused to increase the army's and navy's budget; there was not a single truly valuable vessel in the harbor at the time of the attack. Then came the raid, which totally destroyed two obsolete battleships and seriously damaged six others, but these vessels were completely unusable in the first line. So "only" lives were lost, but it was precisely for this reason that the opinion of the American public unified with that of the president, the military and navy received their finances, and the US Navy returned all six second-rate battleships after repairs and modernizations. Most importantly, a gigantic plan to build a modern navy was set in motion. So, no matter how I look at it, I don't see this as a Japanese victory, and I strongly doubt that this was a surprise attack. What I believe is that war blockbusters should be made this way, and if today's filmmakers have almost all-powerful CGI at their disposal, I cannot understand how such crappy films like Pearl Harbor (2001) can be made. And I don't mean the sappy romance grafted on to it, I just don't understand why Michael Bay didn't have historically accurate replicas of ships generated. Maybe he just couldn't care less about it. The film does have some minor issues but I give it a five for how effortlessly it surpasses the current ones. / Lesson learned: Forewarned is forearmed. 5*- (16/07/2023)