Battle of Okinawa

Sword of Doom director Kihachi Okamoto applies his command of apocalyptic foreboding to World War II's Pacific Theatre, specifically the stresses and traumas experienced when attempting to repel the advances of a thundering, technologically superior force. Battle of Okinawa then is a despairing docudrama-style account that mixes squished, monochromatic newsreel footage and narration (courtesy of Kiyoshi Kobayashi, the voice actor used to dub James Coburn and Lee Marvin for the Japanese market) with bullet-point scenes featuring soldiers and civilians that slowly detail the sheer hopelessness that these people face. Comparatively, the encroaching American forces are rarely seen and certainly never investigated. Their presence is vividly felt though, predominantly through the genuinely relentless sound of whistling shells that batter the land and populace of Okinawa or, as the film winds to its excruciating conclusion, the small squads of middle-distance figures who taunt and turn their machine gun fire towards Battle's surviving cast. 

Although crammed with dozens of actors, all sweating (but not necessarily rotting) in under-ventilated caves, and buoyed by brief special-effects interludes courtesy of Godzilla whizz Teruyoshi Nakano, Okamoto's film doesn't position itself as an epic extravaganza. Instead of attempting to compete with the enormous logistical scale of similar Hollywood productions, Battle is a simmering, piecemeal experience that uses broad characterisations and humorous archetypes as a way of wringing maximum pathos from the non-stop human carnage. Very obviously told from a purely Japanese perspective, with scant reference to that country's violent, imperialistic recent history, Battle may be ambivalent about the uncaring orders issued by military dictatorships - that have very much hung these people out to dry - but it greedily catalogues any and every intermingling of suicide and nationalistic (or perhaps regional, even prefectural) pride. Under threat of extermination by a foreign entity, that may as well be a natural disaster, Okamoto's film relays that the people of Okinawa judged it better to sip poison on the beach or drive a blade into their trunk than to be cooked alive by a GI's flamethrower.