Movie Motivation

If you are like me, then you are a fan of WW II movies.  But, since I have a military background, I tend to favor the nuts and bolts of battle over drama and cine-craft.  The Great Raid, about the raid on Cabanatuan, does deliver battle scenes and, for the mili-nerd, a goodly amount of planning, tactics and maneuver.  Hollywood critics find that too banal, and you might, too.


But wait, there's more.  The Great Raid also offers a love story, an account of the life of the Filipinos under Japanese occupation, and some history of a major part of the Pacific Theater, the operations in The Philippines.


When I write my own reviews, I do a quick study of what the media has written about about a movie.  The website Pop Matters had a review that the author no-doubt thought was intelligent, but in my opinion was simple snark.  About The Great Raid, she wrote, "The relationship between heroism and villainy remains reductive, subjective, and devastatingly predictable."  


One of the themes we will be developing here at On World War II will be the changing place of the war in our culture.  Is there currently a trend towards historic revision, or simply a lazy ignorance of the events of the war?  Does our Pop Matters author (name omitted intentionally) assume that her own sense of the events in the Pacific war is prevalent in our culture?  Apparently so.  I wonder what the average Filipino man on-the-street would say about this?


For my part, I was interested in how the movie went to some lengths to inform us of the atrocities of the Japanese Imperial military during WW II.  You will cringe when the movie depicts American prisoners, and at another time a Filipino nursing staff, being summarily executed with shots to the head.  Of course, this evil should require more nuance to explain (sarc/off).


In our present day, I think it's good for storytellers to give the motivation behind events in WW II.  People forget with time, or need to be told for the first time, that WW II was a war fought against evil.  Bad things happened.  The men and women who spent a short, but brilliant few years as soldiers, nurses, freedom fighters (in the case of the Filipino irregulars), and partisans were heroes in no uncertain (or nuanced) terms.


Another good movie to accompany your study of the Bataan and Philippines campaigns is Back To Bataan, with John Wayne.  It was filmed on the heels of the war, and did feature some of the Death March survivors.  But, in 1945, the references were fresh and raw, and audiences didn't need to be told what had happened in the Philippines in WW II.


http://popmatters.com/film/reviews/g/great-raid-2005.shtml