The Movie Room

Tora! Tora! Tora! 1970, directed by Richard Fleischer, Toshio Masuda, and Kinji Rukasaku

Rating: 9/10

I’ve owned this movie for a while, and have been meaning to watch it for even longer. It’s been a blind spot that I knew one day I would fix, if I could just make the time for a 2.5 hour old-fashioned Hollywood epic that I figured would drag—now that I’ve finally watched it, I am pleasantly surprised.

I was expecting it to be over-the-top and melodramatic like Gone with the Wind or Doctor Zhivago (both of which I love), but this movie is actually fairly measured, which is its greatest plus. I know there were behind the scenes issues that led to Akira Kurosawa being fired from directing the Japanese scenes (which I can understand—this does not feel like a good fit for Kurosawa), but having an American director and two Japanese directors switching off works greatly to this film’s benefit. The film as a whole feels united because no side is blamed or pardoned, they are both just examined and shown to have faults as well as seemingly good reasons, but the American and Japanese scenes still feel distinct enough to make an impact on the viewer. This separate but conjoined feel really sucked me in, as the clash in film-making styles only emphasizes further the clash in ideologies between nations. Trying to cover so much over two countries in just under 2.5 hours does have some draw-backs though, as it does not really allow any of the actors to stand out in a good or bad way. The Japanese actors fare better than the American ones, because they are given more time to contemplate their situation and less expositional dialogue, but still it feels like this movie does not really care about acting. 

Going forward, now that I’ve seen this film, I feel like it will be my go-to movie when discussing or wanting to watch something about Pearl Harbor. I also own Michael Bay’s 2001 film Pearl Harbor, which is all the things I feared this movie would be but worse than I could imagine, and Fred Zinnemann’s 1953 Academy Award for Best Picture winning From Here to Eternity, which is also sentimental but in a much better way than Pearl Harbor. If I was going off of just enjoyment and entertainment value, I would stick with From Here to Eternity, but whereas that one focuses more on the romantic entanglements and psychological tensions of the soldiers who never expected to see any action, I really appreciate just the attention to detail in Tora! Tora! Tora! Usually exposition is a negative for a film, but here (though there is possibly too much of it), it really serves a great purpose as a countdown clock to the event itself and each introduction of a new historical figure just adds to the educational aspect at play here. And, of course, when it actually gets time to showing the attack, it is spectacular. Michael Bay definitely knows how to blow stuff up in his movies, but the attack in Pearl Harbor pales horribly in comparison to what is shown in Tora! Tora! Tora!

I am glad that I finally sat down and just watched this movie, and now I can see myself doing so again in the future with much less debate. The Blu-ray version I have contains both the theatrical version and the Japanese extended version; there is not much difference between the two, but there are a couple extra scenes in the extended version that I enjoyed, including a comic relief scene between two cooks discussing the international date line—I would definitely continue to choose the slightly longer version.