Under the Flag of the Rising Sun

12/25/2013

No big-budget battle picture, this is a small, intimate chamber of moral horrors. Fukasaku spares neither his characters nor his viewers to deliver a personal anti-war film that indicts an entire social system. People are tested to the breaking point, without meaning or goal except to escape a miserable death. By the end of the story, you are invited to conclude that no one who felt the brunt of the war survived it; that in truth the Japanese nation did not survive. Those who stay more or less intact seem frankly superhuman. Prominently featured: sham leadership, ethical vacuity, corruption, betrayal, guilt, and an individual struggle to to avoid being overwhelmed and erased. The flesh-and-blood characters double as social types in a harsh allegory of Japan’s collective refusal to a