And the epic saga continues
.
Read this only after the reviews for parts one and two. There won't be any spoilers but the review will make more sense.
Having survived the near-total extermination of his unit at the end of Part II, Kaji (Tatsuya Nakadai) wanders through war-torn China with a group of hopeless survivors. Everyone they encounter deals with defeat and despair in their own way.
It all comes to an end with style, though that style is bleaker and more episodic than either of the previous chapters. The great tragedy of Kaji's life is that the closest he comes to being free of the horrors of war, the further he is – geographically speaking – from the only thing he truly wants: reunion with his loving wife. This detail gives the film, in many ways your standard squad war film, an important extra dimension it would never have had as a stand-alone piece.
After about 10 hours in 3 films, Kobayashi has given us a POW drama, a character study about duty VS dignity, a war film that crushed Full Metal Jacket, a roaming war-set nightmare that rivals Apocalypse Now, all wrapped up in an uncompromisingly humanist masterpiece. You will feel exhausted by the end of this, physically – 10 hours of straight cinema-scope horrors takes a toll on the eyes – and mentally. But it is undoubtedly one of the mind-expanding works of film, and one of the greatest tragedies ever put to the screen.
If you'd ever wondered, now you know what cinema's answer to Hamlet looks like.
Read this only after the reviews for parts one and two. There won't be any spoilers but the review will make more sense.
Having survived the near-total extermination of his unit at the end of Part II, Kaji (Tatsuya Nakadai) wanders through war-torn China with a group of hopeless survivors. Everyone they encounter deals with defeat and despair in their own way.
It all comes to an end with style, though that style is bleaker and more episodic than either of the previous chapters. The great tragedy of Kaji's life is that the closest he comes to being free of the horrors of war, the further he is – geographically speaking – from the only thing he truly wants: reunion with his loving wife. This detail gives the film, in many ways your standard squad war film, an important extra dimension it would never have had as a stand-alone piece.
After about 10 hours in 3 films, Kobayashi has given us a POW drama, a character study about duty VS dignity, a war film that crushed Full Metal Jacket, a roaming war-set nightmare that rivals Apocalypse Now, all wrapped up in an uncompromisingly humanist masterpiece. You will feel exhausted by the end of this, physically – 10 hours of straight cinema-scope horrors takes a toll on the eyes – and mentally. But it is undoubtedly one of the mind-expanding works of film, and one of the greatest tragedies ever put to the screen.
If you'd ever wondered, now you know what cinema's answer to Hamlet looks like.