Review

Very good acting but I feel weird about the general premise. We're really really soft on the Japanese. Like, the conditions of this camp are in complete fantasy land. The Japanese were in many cases worse than the Nazis in terms of how they treated POWs. It was really taking me out of it. Alec Guinness really made me hate him. A well-acted character. But I could not understand why we weren't resisting. Why were we so quick to collaborate with the Japanese? An idea Alex and I discussed after watching was taking away the commando bits of the movie. First, this would have cut down the runtime a bit (and I would not weep for that at all, it was a good length movie). And secondly, this would have given us more of a chance to understand the relationship between the Brits and the Japs. As it was, when Nicholson started tracing the wire back to the detonator with Saito, I was screaming "What in the FUCK are you doing?!" If we the audience don't see the commandos setting everything up, that might help it come more as a surprise. When the war proper shows back up on our doorstep after being isolated on the island for so long. There's a good movie here, but I feel like it has some structural issues.