Change Your Image
hkim-5
Reviews
Starship Troopers (1997)
Too Meta as a satire. Maybe it is great if you agree with the message, but not that great as a movie.
Starship Troopers is not a very good movie by itself. It can be very interesting if you leave the movie and try to place it in context of the real life--especially if you agree with Verhoeven's message.
People point out that the movie is supposed to be full of biting satire. Yet, the problem is that the satire is not especially obvious to most viewers, unless they were, somehow, already receptive to the movie's message. To the more naive viewers, the movie just seems like full of poor, over-the-top, and unmotivated acting without much of a plot (all of which are true). If the seemingly ignorant reaction of the audience is itself part of the satire (even if unintended), that seems like like an indictment of the movie rather than a plaudit: if the audience doesn't get the message, the movie failed to deliver it properly. If the only people who get it are those who agree with the movie's themes already, it is a poor communicator, which, in turn, makes for not-exactly-a- great movie.
If the movie were actually better written, acted, and its point more apparent, it might have been an actually good movie whose virtues can be appreciated by everyone, whether they agreed or not. In its current form, it is just a polemic that leaves the audience has to fill in what it is polemical about--and leaves them confused if they don't know the context.
The Brylcreem Boys (1998)
A film that could have been vs. It is.
It is an enjoyable movie based loosely on real life events at the World War 2 era internment camp in Ireland where combatants from both Allied and Axis forces who wound up on Irish soil were placed in, as long as you don't think too much about the obvious. It is rather shallow and stereotyped on the whole, although it is quite well done in certain aspects. The extreme history buffs, those who know the actual background of Irish neutrality and Eire's relations with both Britain and Germany at this time extremely well, could nitpick over some of the history as depicted in the film, but on the whole, the movie does get most of the history fairly accurately.
There is plenty of good material that could have been developed better here, besides the (mostly) accurate historical background. There is genuine dramatic tension among so many of the characters: the complex love-hate relationship between the Irish and the British (e.g. the camp commandant was a guest of the camp himself when it was a British prison camp for Irish political prisoners or how the family members of many Irish families around the camp are serving in the British Army), the unease among the prisoners about being in an easy-going internment while their friends and families are in a war where they are being killed or maimed (the German sailor who commits suicide over his family being killed in an air raid and the excessive brutality and super-nationalistic attitude of some German officers, for example), and of course, the whole premise about enemies in war having to be civil towards each other in a neutral country under unwilling circumstances, etc. None of these themes really gets developed clearly, in part because all of these are just mentioned too quickly and are left behind without being really developed, and also, to a large degree because most of the actors are, for the most part, rather wooden and their dialogue a bit too clichéd (Campbell, playing Miles Keough, is especially guilty of this as is Jean Butler, but at least, for the latter, it is her acting debut in a feature film, as far as I know. Byrne, with his character's interesting background as a former political prisoner turned camp commandant, could have played more of a role, but he is almost entirely a background character.) Given how underdeveloped and scatterbrained the overall film seems, the end narration seems like an evasive cop-out.
It is annoying also that the writers seem completely undecided on whether Keogh is an actual Canadian or an American serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force, as he is referred to as both at different times in the film. (Historically, there was only one American in the camp, who did escape, and was sent back by the British authorities, as per what happens to the indisputably American RAF pilot in the film. Most Allied personnel at the camp did leave the camp before the war was over, as the Irish government repatriated most, if not all, Allied internees some time in 1943 (but it is at least a year after the film's end) although the Germans had to stay on until the war ended.)
Zipang (2004)
Not your usual anime
This is an astonishing series. The Mirai, the latest AEGIS destroyer of the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense force, en route to a joint exercise with the U.S. Navy at Hawaii encounters a weather anomaly near Midway Island. When it clears, the Mirai suddenly finds itself surrounded by the Imperial Japanese Navy's Combined Fleet just before the Battle of Midway.
Unlike other alternate World War II histories (such as the Final Countdown), the characters in Zipang face a far more ambiguous moral choice. Whereas Kirk Douglas' character in the Final Countdown has no qualms about joining the World War II US forces to change history (and is prevented from doing so by the temporal anomaly taking the ship back to its own time), the crew of Mirai doesn't consider it obvious that they should join the Japanese side. They are aware that it is a country run by militarists with a mindset very different from theirs. As the Japanese from the present era, they are not at war with the United States. They know that the present day Japan has been built on the defeat of the imperialistic Japan of World War II era. Yet, they are conflicted over their sentiment as Japanese, knowing that millions of their countrymen would die in course of the war. They also question their lack of direction, not knowing what their purpose is in an era long ago. Finally, they have to deal with the fact that they need supplies to keep themselves going, regardless of what they are to do.
The rescue of Lt. Commander Kusaka, a naval intelligence officer whose courier plane was shot down during the Battle of Midway complicates things. Kusaka is not a typical militarist--he thinks the Pacific War was a mistake and should be ended as soon as possible. However, he is also a Japanese of 1940s who thinks how the war actually ended is intolerable. Once he learns the events of the future while on board the Mirai, he immediately goes about with a plan to remake the future according to his vision--to bring about what he terms "Zipang," a new Japan that is neither the defeated Japan of Mirai's future or the military dictatorship of his present. However, it is no less of an empire--it would still rule over Japan's pre-War empire, especially Manchuria and its resources. Worse still, Kusaka is willing to ruthlessly sacrifice lives of thousands in order to achieve his vision. The crew of Mirai has to deal with not only the mundane task of survival, but also with the threat to their future posed by Kusaka.