Nihonkai daikaisen: Umi jukaba

Three years after the release of Port Arthur, The Japanese returned to their famous period of history, in which the then-underestimated island nation living in voluntary feudal isolation rose to become major players that had to be reckoned with. Director Toshio Masuda has apparently learned from the mistakes made in his previous film, yet the creators tried to surprise the viewer with misleading information. When I heard the sentence: "We know that there are eight warships and about forty other vessels," it was clear to me that somebody had made an error. Whether it was the fault of the creators or the subtitles, I do not know, but there were eight armored ships (predecessors of later pre-dreadnoughts), while the "forty other vessels" included three coast defense ships, cruisers, destroyers, and other warships including supply and hospital ships. From the original sentence, I felt as if the Russians sailed from the Baltic Sea with eight warships accompanied by forty excursion steamers, because the aristocrats wanted to see if Vice Admiral Rozhestvensky would make it. In addition to similar deficiencies, the film also contained a grandiose romantic and melodramatic passage that the lovers of soap operas would surely love, the battle itself becoming marginal in the story. And yet I was not completely dissatisfied, because the creators obviously did their best. However, CGI was the music of the future back then, so there was not much to see of the ships, the turretless guns were somewhat funny, but it wasn't really the point. It was about Japanese pride in victory over one of the former great powers. When, after the peace treaty, other great powers forced Japan to surrender most of its territorial gains (otherwise it would threaten their colonial rule in Asia), the Japanese felt it as an insult to themselves and their fallen (of whom there were many). After World War I, Japan (fighting on the side of the Allies) suffered another insult (the outcome of both naval conferences), the gulf deepened again. These were the two main events that led to Pearl Harbor... Well, it was not the best movie, but it was significantly better than Port Arthur, so I think it deserves three stars. / There won't be any lessons learned, just a reflection on the sentence from the beginning of the film: "Russia sent its Baltic fleet, which was claimed to be the most powerful in the world." I wonder who claimed that. The Royal Navy would have to collectively burst out laughing. (13/07/2023)