Tora! Tora! Tora! is a 1970 film directed by Richard Fleischer, Kinji Fukasaku and Toshio Masuda and starring way too many people to name here.
It’s a little ridiculous to make a comparison (given that one is a serious attempt at a war film, the other basically a bad romance novel set during a war), but I can’t help it: I’d take this film over Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor any day. One has interesting characters, exciting action, and a well-told story. The other has a love triangle made up of two nitwits and an airhead. One has some unintentional humour. The other would be humorous if it wasn’t so god-awful. One attempts to paint a reasonably accurate picture of a horrific act of aggression. The other one is a horrific act of aggression.
Films today rarely do what Tora Tora Tora does so well – the long, slow build up to the action. I mean basically for the first 90 minutes you watch people sitting around talking. Now, I have a reasonably short attention span, but I wasn’t bored for a minute. Because all the talking perfectly sets the scene for when the action does happen. It’s set up so well that every explosion during the film’s last 40 minutes makes sense. “See, he told you not to park all those planes so close together!!”
There are a few unintentional laughs that I love. There’s a war room where the Americans are using a code breaking machine to decipher Japanese radio traffic. I really dig the guy’s explanation for how the code-breaking machine works. It’s very scientific: “We feed the code in here, it goes round and round in there, then it comes out here.” Brilliant!
And I find people having doors closed in their faces very comedic. The code-breaking guy does this to his secretary a few times over the course of the film – she has this bewildered expression as he barks an order and then slams the door on her. It’s almost spoof-like in its goofiness.
There is also the scene with a Japanese officer describing the plan of attack while shirtless and sweaty, his eyes closed and slowly rubbing his head as he speaks. I love the way the guy behind him slowly backs out of the room and closes the door, and I love that he just continues talking once the guy’s gone. The whole scene is delightfully odd.
It’s the intentional humour that doesn’t work as well. Like the two morons who mistake a Japanese bomber for an American plane: “Get that guy’s number, I’m going to bring him up on charges!” And the military band conductor - as he strikes the last note of the US anthem, the ship beneath him explodes. The comedic tone of the moment is woefully out of place.
And I always admire the logistics of such vast productions. It must have been an incredible task to put this film together. And the film, for the most part makes an effort to tell a balanced story. I like that the Japanese are never depicted as the “bad guys” - you see the cause-and-effect of the political and military decisions that led to their disastrous decision to attack the US naval base. And they are not just the faceless enemy – each of the main Japanese characters is just as fleshed out and interesting, if not more so, as the American participants. Yes, the film has some pro-American sentiment - the most obvious is Yamamoto’s “Americans are a proud and just people” speech, but it’s not always that cut and dried. Mostly it depicts a series of events leading to an inevitable conclusion. The film knows that we know how it ends – so it makes no attempt to hide this and that means that even during it’s slowest scenes, it’s never uninteresting.
In fact it’s the slower bits that I find the most compelling. The Pearl Harbor attack is an incredibly well-staged set piece, but it’s nothing we haven’t seen in other war films, and how it plays out is a no-brainer to anyone with even a passing knowledge of WWII. I like the closed-door discussions and the foreboding series of events leading to the attack – the combination of ignorance and hubris among the US military brass, and the massive ideological divide between the military and the diplomats on the Japanese side.
Plus it ends with possibly the best war-time quote of all time, Japanese Admiral Yamamoto’s famous: “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.” Two and a half hours well spent.
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