Description
Tora! Tora! Tora is a historical film about the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The Japanese sequences were directed by Toshio Masuda and Kinji Fukasaku, after Akira Kurosawa withdrew from the film. The American director, Richard Fleischer, oversaw the complicated production. The first half of the film maps out the collapse of diplomacy between the nations and the military blunders that left naval and air forces sitting ducks for the impending attack. The second half is an amazing re-creation of the devastating battle. While Tora! Tora! Tora! lacks the strong central characters that anchor the best war movies, the real star of the film is the climactic 30-minute battle, a massive feat of cinematic engineering that expertly conveys the surprise, the chaos, and the immense destruction of the only attack by a foreign power on American soil since the Revolutionary War. The special effects won a well-deserved Oscar, but the film was shut out of every other category by, ironically, the other epic war picture of the year, Patton.
"Sir, there's a large formation of planes coming in from the north,
140 miles, 3 degrees east." "Yeah? Don't worry about it." This is
just one of the many mishaps chronicled in Tora! Tora! Tora! The
epic film shows the bombing of Pearl Harbor from both sides in the
historic first American-Japanese coproduction: American director
Richard Fleischer oversaw the complicated production (the Japanese
sequences were directed by Toshio Masuda and Kinji Fukasaku, after
Akira Kurosawa withdrew from the film), wrestling a sprawling story
with dozens of characters into a manageable, fairly easy-to-follow
film. The first half maps out the collapse of diplomacy between the
nations and the military blunders that left naval and air forces
sitting ducks for the impending attack, while the second half is an
amazing re-creation of the devastating battle. While Tora! Tora!
Tora! lacks the strong central characters that anchor the best war
movies, the real star of the film is the climactic 30-minute
battle, a massive feat of cinematic engineering that expertly
conveys the surprise, the chaos, and the immense destruction of the
only attack by a foreign power on American soil since the
Revolutionary War. The special effects won a well-deserved Oscar,
but the film was shut out of every other category by, ironically,
the other epic war picture of the year, Patton. --Sean Axmaker
Related Products
