Huge scale tale of the battleship Yamato and its crew. from 1942 to its sinking. Told in flashback as memories are provoked in a survivor by a woman, the daughter of another survivor, wanting to visit the final resting place on the 60th anniversary of its sinking. This is a story of youthful idealism tinged and changed by the course of war and a culture that celebrates death in battle as something glorious. It examines why men fight and what can we hope to get out of war.

This is a very good and moving film. For all of the clichés (is there a well worn plot device it doesn't have?) it does manage to touch the heart and the head. We really do care about the characters we see up on the screen, and what happens to them, death in a foolish adventure, moves us. At the same time we get to see the waste that is war and was the Japanese war effort in the final days of World War Two. Its made clear that the fight to the end mentality leaves no room for tomorrow. Its best expressed in a simple scene on the bridge of the ship. One of the officers is asked to explain the difference between chivalry, the Western code of war, and Bushido, the Japanese code. Bushido, he says is preparing for a death with no reward, Chivalry is trying to live a noble life. Its a difference that all of the men can see but which very few ever get the chance to live by. Even the survivors, the old man essentially telling the story, is haunted by the fact that he lived and everyone else died.As the film asks plainly, if we all die, who's going to be around to take advantage of our sacrifices? Its a question that needs to be asked in this age of suicide bombers. There is a great many other thematic threads running through this film that lift it out of the typical war movie pile.

The cast is top notch. They manage to take what is often a clichéd script and to infuse it with the power of reality. Modern sequences aside, you care for these people and you are moved by what happens to them. The tears that well up in the final modern scenes come from the fact that the cast of the war sections is so good that you carry over the emotion. I wish that the modern sequences had given the actors something to do other than simply push the story into action.

Technically the film is very impressive. The Yamato, is monster of a ship and its plain to see that great care was taken in recreating it. Its a beautiful movie to look at with the entire film having a wonderful sense of place and time. The two battle scenes are graphic in a way that I've never seen in a naval war film (if you don't like blood you may want to look elsewhere.) This is going to be something to rattle the windows with on DVD.

If the film has any real flaw thats its length. The film is about two and a half hours long and to be honest it probably could have been shorter. I was getting fidgety during some of it. Its not that its bad, its just that the films pace allows you too much time to dwell on some of the by the numbers construction of the plot so you just want the film to get to the next bit (what another tearful goodbye?). It doesn't kill the film, it just makes it hard to truly get lost in the story.

If you like war films, or good movies this is one to keep an eye out for. Just be ready to do a little digging since I'm not sure if this is going to get a regular release outside of Asia.

On April, 6th 2005, in Makurazi, Kagoshima, Makiko Uchida (Kyôka Suzuki) seeks a boat in the local fishing cooperative to take her to the latitude N30, longitude L128, where the largest, heaviest and most powerfully armed battleships ever constructed Yamato was sunk on April, 7th 1945; however, her request is denied. She meets by chance the captain Katsumi Kamio (Tatsuya Nakadai) of the fishing vessel Asukamaru and discloses that she is the stepdaughter of Officer Nagoya Uchida (Shidô Nakamura) and Kamio immediately accepts to take her in the risky journey. While traveling with Makiko and the fifteen year-old Atsuchi (Sosuke Ikematsu),Kamio recalls and discloses the story of Yamato and his close friends that served on board of the battleship until the final suicidal mission in Okinawa. When they reach the spot where Yamato was sunk, he considers that he finally reached the end of the Shōwa era.

"Otoko-tachi no Yamato" is a dramatic movie based on the true story of the Battleship Yamato in World War II. This film gives an approach of Japanese relationship in war totally different from the stereotype of American and European movies of this genre that usually treat Japanese soldiers as cold blood killers detached from any emotions. In "Yamato!", the Japanese military are human beings, with beloved ones, families and comradeship between them, giving more credibility to the story. However, director Junya Sato exaggerates in the melodramatic subplots and in many moments the viewer has the sensation of watching a soap-opera instead of a drama. The final battle of Yamato is engaging and one of the best moments of this film. The music score is repetitive and boring and I personally did not like it. Last but not the least, the Shōwa period mentioned by Katsumi Kamio in one of his last lines literally means, in accordance with the Wikipedia, "period of enlightened peace", or Shōwa era, is the period of Japanese history corresponding to the reign of Emperor Shōwa (Hirohito),from December 25th, 1926 to January 7th, 1989. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Yamato"

I am an American PhD student based in both Japan and Micronesia doing extensive fieldwork with the survivors of the Pacific War in the Pacific Islands and Japan--as well as the families of war dead. Since I have been really involved most recently with the families of soldiers and sailors who died in the Pacific, I naturally wanted to see this movie.

I found myself with tears in my eyes from the very beginning, because it was as if all the black and white photographs I have been generously shown by these families were coming to life--the young faces of these sailors, frightened, proud, and eager to live up to their responsibilities, were very true to what I sense was really happening in the 1940s.

I have to say, unlike the very propagandist flavor of many American films about the Pacific War, including most recently 'Pearl Harbor,' this film really delves into the traumatic aspects of masculinity in general and having to live up to "being a man" in Japan just as much as it celebrates the humanity of the people involved. Many American films, with the exception of 'Saving Private Ryan' and several films about Vietnam, tend to stick to very comic-like stark depictions of heroes and villains and an overall sense of being "victimized" by the enemy. Here, the enemy is not the United States but rather masculinity and male pride itself, as well as the whole tragic story they create.

As such, it is a welcome remedy to way too much American-biased victory narratives that obscure the face of the Japanese military, and to films that portray menacing, dehumanized battalions of Japanese soldiers advancing forth without any legitimate context of their own. We see in this film the faces of these young men and understand what situation they were coming from.

That said, clearly the film was trying to be sensitive to war bereaved and to the official narratives of Japanese pretexts for war, and in that sense I feel they overdid it a little. We don't get a sense, for instance, about Japan's colonial presence throughout Asia and the Pacific--only the vague notion that Japan somehow got involved in war. Still, this isn't really a film about why the war happened, but rather about how it was to live and fight in the immediate time preceding Japanese surrender. In that sense, I do want to make the critique that this film really could have done with even MORE contextualization and solid research of popular Japanese culture at the time, because this would have added even more to its convincing sense of reality. For instance, the soundtrack would have been greatly enhanced with some of the evocative marching music and the ballads on the radio in the 1930s and 1940s that encouraged young men to join the navy and go south to the South Seas.

These songs are still sung even by the bereaved families who go back to visit the places where their loved ones died, so it would have been quite powerful if we got to hear them throughout the film. The absence of small details like this, some rather poorly-imitated Japanese regional dialects, and some of the melodramatic overacting by a few members of the cast, detracted somewhat from the overall production. But in general, this is a very fine film, extremely well acted (and compassionately so) by its cast.

I have been reading a book about the film in Japanese and it's fascinating to learn how so many of the cast worked directly with Japanese veterans and the bereaved families in order to develop their characters and their behavior. So in many respects this film is not only based on the realities of battle (which are really just the backdrop) but on the real life realities of war and on being a young man in the Japanese Imperial Navy in 1944-1945.

In all, it's an extremely meaningful film that needs to be distributed widely through the world. I know there is a lot of resistance to its release in China and Korea, understandably, but I think this is a portrait of what was going on for Japanese at the time and as such could even work as a tool to facilitate better understanding in these countries. It is essential that more compassionate films like this are made that go on to address the complexity and horror of what happened in Asia and the Pacific-- to the people whose lives were colonized and ruined by Japanese aggression, but at least it's a start. It appears to me that Japanese popular culture is finally ready to address the war in all of its ugliness and begin to heal some of these old wounds.