Customer Reviews

Midnight Eagle

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we saw this movie in tokyo. bad story, bad camera-lighting, flat composition, weak special effects, acting is so wooden as typical of japanese films, twists are bad copy of past good hollywood films, no originality etc. save your money in these hard times and catch it on tv at midnight some years down the road...
it is bad idea for hollywood to remake this bad film

Overall, pretty good Japanese movie. DVD quality is good as well. Might not rival the multi-zillion dollar Hollywood ventures but still good.

Midnight Eagle is a standard B movie thriller about international intrigue, but it is interesting because of its observations, which, may or may not be, valid viewpoints in the eyes of the Japanese.

A war photographer, Yuji Nishizaki, played by Takao Osawa, photographs a plane crashing in the Japanese Alps. The Japanese self-defense forces go on alert, and another journalist, Shinichiro Ochiai, played by Hiroshi Tamaki, talks Nishizaki into going to the crash site to see what type of load the plane was carrying.

Without giving away the details of the plot, it is a race, as not only are the Japanese Self-Defense forces racing to the plane, but an armed group of foreign agents, and it is imperative that the Japanese reach the plane first. The journalists end up assisting the Japanese armed forces.

In a way, it's kind of like the Japanese version of the movie, the Green Berets, with John Wayne. The two journalists, for their own reasons, are anti-military, but end up seeing the necessity of a country having to have armed forces. Ironically, the army major credits Nishizaki on why he ended up with a career in the armed forces.

In most ways, however, it's not like the Japanese version of the Green Berets because the movie is highly critical of the United States and Japan's relationship with the United States. Whereas the Green Berets applauded American involvement in foreign lands, this movie directly and indirectly criticizes the United States for "bossing around" Japan without considering the implications for Japan, and is critical of the Japanese governemnt for letting the United States push it around to the point where a crisis has developed which, if not resolved correctly, would cause tremendous destruction to Japan.

In the end, though, I believe the message in the movie is that: 1. regardless of the United States' role in world affairs, there will be nations trying to destroy Japan just for the sake of it, and 2. it behooves the Japanese citizenry to support the self-defense forces, and 3. Japan needs to be more vocal when it disagrees with the use of United States' military within Japan.

I've made the movie sound more deep than it really is. If you're all into politics, you'll probably enjoy this different perspective than you would get from an American movie, but for the action and plot, it's pretty standard (maybe a little below standard).