Tora! Tora! Tora!

Will Menaker3.5

Admiral Yamamoto and company plan and pull off the Pearl Harbor attack, while their American counterparts completely drop the ball in this patient and detailed historical procedural. Do the Americans at the highest levels of the Roosevelt administration fuck up the copious warnings they had on purpose though? This film doesn't NOT imply this. The first half is very dry, but in the second half they blow up everything and film lots of real airplanes, explosions and property damage. Pretty ballsy to have half this movie in Japanese and give Yamamoto and his staff a lot more pathos and personality than any of the Americans.I like movies like this where there is no real main character, "good" guy or villain, so individuals recede into the background and it really becomes a portrait of how people and information are sorted around two large and competing state bureaucracies, each made up of their own large, confusing and competing bureaucracies, which is a good way to understand exactly how and why grand historical events actually happen. A "bureaucratic procedural" that echoes a lot of what Fleischer did in "The Boston Strangler."

Lebowskidoo 🇨🇦 🎬 🍿🦞🎃4.0

This was The Pearl Harbor Movie up until Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor was released. Unlike that movie, Tora! Tora! Tora! is a pretty standard, straight-laced, stodgy and almost documentary-like telling of the events leading up to that fateful day. For a movie title containing three exclamation points, it's a bit of a slog in places. However, having been to Pearl Harbor and stood on that platform over the U.S.S. Arizona and hearing the horrible events that took place there, I can honestly say it punches you right in the gut. To see the attack unfold in this movie is really something. Once it begins, this movie is as gripping as anything. I also liked that the Japanese were given half the movie to tell it from their own perspective. That's quite admirable, and not something I would have assumed Hollywood would do at that time, so good for them.

Rafael "Mister Movie" Jovine3.5

Action! - The Way of the Yakuza: The Turbulent Battles of FukasakuI've known about this film for a while, but only by name. I had no idea what it was about, and so on. And, to my surprise, it was a really interesting (and presumably pretty accurate) look into all the behind-the-scenes events leading up to the Pearl Harbor attack from both the US and Japan's perspectives, which of course gives us a more complete picture of the event. For someone like me, who knew the attack had happened but knew little about the events leading up to it, this was incredibly illuminating. If the movie and some video I watched about the atomic bomb drops on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are to be believed, Japan had a fatally serious problem with delay that could have saved them from, as the movie puts it, "wake up a sleeping giant" that will eventually bite them in the a$$. This has got to have one of the best and most underappreciated last quotes in film history; it's a superb way to wrap things off.Performance-wise, everyone does a good job. There wasn't anyone who particularly stood out to me, but they all got the job. The direction is excellent as well. Apparently, Kurosawa was supposed to direct all of the Japanese scenes, but he was replaced by Kinji and Toshio Masuda, who did an excellent job, but I'm not sure what exactly and how much input he had, and you can't see much of Fukasaku's fingerprints. However, the film's stellar sound design and breathtaking cinematography steal the show, particularly in a moment depicting the Japanese approaching Pearl Harbor and seeing an amazing vision of what they call "the rising sun," the sun popping out of a cloud with a big sunlight coming off.All in all, an intriguing, educational, and stunningly shot movie on an event that changed the course of history.Action! - The Way of the Yakuza: The Turbulent Battles of FukasakuTODAY SCHEDULEJapan Organized Crime BossTora! Tora! Tora!Under the flag of the rising sunHimiko