Customer Reviews

Silent Service

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you like submarine movies like the German DAS BOOT or THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER you will undoubetly enjoy this anime.
The story revolves around a secret US-Japanese joint venture: the first Japanese nuclear submarine. On the U-boat's first mission captain KAIEDA and his crew start a mutiny and arrest the US liaison officer. The renegades rename their vessel YAMATO after a famous Japanese World War II battleship. Captain KAIEDA has an agenda of his own (namely achieving world peace by bluffing the USA into believing that the YAMATO is armed with nuclear missiles) and soon Japan and the United States are on the brink of war...
SILENT SERVICE moves at breakneck speed and is actionfilled from start to finish. More naval battles than in the second World War! Okay, okay, I admit I am exaggerating here, but it is amazing how much naval action (and story!) is crammed in the film's 100 minutes running time. The film also succeeds in creating quite a tension in the scenes which are common to submarine movies: officers listening anxiously to their sonar, vessels trying to out-manouvre one another, depth charges attacks, crash dives. The military hardware on display appears to be depicted accurately. I also liked the main character, captain KAIEDA, who is a righteous man and an excellent naval officer with nerves of steel.
While it did not bother me, I am aware that some US viewers may dislike the "the Americans can't be trusted" message of the film, evident not only in the overall storyline, but in some details as well (e.g. the American president before attending an international summit reads a "Japan Re-occupation Plan").
Don't let this put you off!
In my view most anime suffer from their usual sci-fi settings with aliens and mechs, so a more realistic and mature japanimation feature is always welcome, even more so when it concerns a war toppic. If you are a military buff, you'll like this one.

Unfortunately the DVD is rather weak on the extra side. There is a rather pointless "meet the characters" - feature and a multiple angle option for the end credits sequence, where you can switch between Japanese and English end titles with your remote control (I recommend to stay with the original). There are also some trailers, of which I liked VIRGIN FLEET best.
The optional English subtitles are easy on the eyes and free of misspellings. There is an English audio track, too.

This is one of the better non-TV-series anime OAVs I've recently seen, mostly for its accurate and authentic use of the naval weapons shown here.

This OAV can best be described as an anime version of The Hunt For Red October, but it has a highly implausible plot which is the premise for the whole OAV. The best way to describe it would be as nationalist anti-American sentiment for Japan's return back to a pre-World-War-II military dictatorship, and a rogue nuclear submarine, dubbed as the Sea Bat but renamed as the Yamato, would lead the way. Highly unlikely, don't know if it's one man's opinion or shared by a nation, but it isn't the strength of this DVD.

The cool factor on this DVD has to do with the naval battles shown here and the surprising accuracy of the proper existing naval weapons depicted here. Unlike most anime where lots of weapons are created from the imaginations of the creators, all of the weapons shown here exist in real-life, except for the prototype super-sub Yamato, which is fabricated here.

When the US Navy hunts down the Yamato, they don't improperly show F-14 Tomcat or F-18 Hornet fighters try to attack a submarine, as a Hollywood film would inaccurately do to shown the sleekest aircraft on screen. Here, P-3 Orions are used for surveillance, and S-3 Vikings (the only submarine hunting airplanes in the US Navy) and Kamen Seasprite helicopters are shown launching torpedoes into the water, as it might happen in the real Navy.

The use of AEGIS cruisers and destroyers, armed with Harpoon anti-ship missiles, 5" cannons, and ASROC anti-sub torpedoes, while defending with Phalanx Vulcan cannons, are all existing weapons in the US Navy, and they are depicted here with surprising accuracy, even with the terminology being used correctly.

If you like submarine movies like The Hunt For Red October or Crimson Tide, you'll appreciate some of the genius tactical moves by the Yamato sub commander here, once you get past the highly dubious political plot of the story.

This film is a terrific teaching tool concerning "how" Japanese militarists and sympathetic politicians began their war with China in the early 1930s that eventually blossomed into WW2: Step 1 - senior government ministers and miltiary officers want to change the status quo in some way (conquer China in the 1930s, eliminate US dominance in SILENT SERVICE) but not be held responsible if the action fails. Step 2 - impressive but radicalized miliary officers are found that will cause a crisis when commanded and they are appointed by these officials to appropriate military commands (Col Tsuji and others in China, Capt Kaieda to the SEABAT in the film). Since these officers are selected for their politics, their promotions are not understood by their peers (note the Captain's friend's reaction in the film). Step 3 - the crisis is created (the Shanghai incident and others, the seizure of the SEABAT in the film). Step 4 - the defenders of the status quo (the West in the 1930s, the US in the film) complain about the crisis but take no effective action to stop it for internal political reasons (the West in the 1930s not wanting to go to war to defend China, the US in the film agonizing over non-existant nuclear weapons). Step 5 - seeing this lack of response, the govt and military officials demand that Japan defer to the superior judgement of the junior officers. Step 6 - when faced by the righteous Japanese, the status quo defenders are revealed as "paper tigers" and back down. Step 7 - the govt/military officials accomplish their objectives.

Although anti-US sentiments and "let the young people do what they want because their hearts are in the right place" plot lines have been used in anime many times before (PATLABOR 2, GHOST IN A SHELL 2nd GIG, SPRIGGAN, SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO, KONPEKI NO KANTAI, etc), it is more extreme in this film. It would be interesting to find out if the film makers intended this to ba an allegory on historic Japanese militarism or not.

A convoluted mess with a plot that takes you on a submarine ride to nowhere. Silent Service is Japanese right wing propoganda given form in anime.

A rogue Japanese Captain and his merry band of nameless, faceless scene filler steal a nuclear submarine intended as a joint military project between the Japanese and the US. The US government is slightly miffed over the idea of a rogue nuclear submarine falling in to the hands of a man who's just crazy enough to declare the sub its own sovereign nation, and sends the US 7th fleet to hunt down the "Seabat."

What follows is 90 minutes of mind numbing talking heads, interspersed with hilariously stupid Americans doing equally stupid things, and an utterly anti-climactic, non-ending.

The dumb Americans and their high-jinks are the sole reason I gave this drek two stars. US Submarine crews go barging into traps so obvious you'd swear Captain W. Coyote was at the helm. The US 7th Fleet launches wave after wave of missles and torpedoes at Japanese ships, nearly all of which are blown out of the sky by the outnumbered, outgunned, but completely wooden, er, I mean stoic Japanese.

The Yanks, on the other hand, can't shoot down two missles to save their amusingly large noses, and hundreds of the round-eyed barbarians sink to the briney deep.

Silent Service is a story of the triumph of Japanese spirit over filthy foreigners. But pay heed to the final words of the blonde haired, blue eyed, large nosed US President: "We still have enough nukes to kill everyone on the planet."

Or something like that. I was reaching for the eject button.

I can't help it - this is an utterly preposterous attempt to make a submarine version of "Area-88", combining an eye for technical with some positively nutty plot ideas and incredibly transparent anti-American sentiment.

WHAT IT'S ALL ABOUT: Pacifist Japan maintains a sleek and professional, if ineffectual military. It's navy, the maritime arm of the Self-Defense Force, contains a number of advanced submarines with old-fashioned diesel-electric powerplants. When one of these subs perishes after colliding with a Russian sub, it's thought that the crew is lost as well. However, the captain is Kaieda, a brilliant and young submarine ace. His classmate at the academy, Fukumachi, can't believe Kaieda dead - not under those circumstances anyway. Fukumachi's suspicions prove correct - Kaieda and his crew staged the incident as part of a larger plan to crew "Sea-Bat", a top-secret new super-sub built by the Americans and the Japanese. To add insult to injury, when his boss finally lets Fukumachi in on the plan, they also tell him that he was barely edged-out by his old classmate. (One was more cautious, the other aggressive - although the fact that Kaieda's expression remains superhumanly serene throughout the movie may have had more to do with it.)

Officially, the nuclear-powered Sea-Bat will be US property, joining the US 7th fleet. On its maiden voyage, however, Kaeida and crew mutiny, proclaiming the sub to be its own sovereign nation, "Yamato". Kaeida keeps the Americans at bay by hinting that the sub has nuclear weapons, chiding the Yanks for their self-declared status of world-policeman. The Americans respond by throwing their naval might against the sub, to painfully self-destructive results. The Americans hold Japan responsible, threatening a new war. The Japanese respond by deploying its fleet to protect Yamato with orders not to fire on US forces. American warships don't prove as reluctant for combat.

After being underwhelmed by "Submarine 707R", I had hoped that "Silent Service", with its less sci-fi plot would give anime a genuine sub-war thriller. On viewing, it's spectacular - the graphics and sound are just awe-inspiring, even in mono. Attacks by rocket-propelled depth-charges and ASROC torpedoes will have you at the edge of your seat. The animation is smooth - no cheesy CGI here. It's clear the animators wanted to get the look and sound right. The interiors of subs are claustrophobic, and the story eschews futuristic weapons and vehicles for those known to be service.

Unfortunately, "Silent Service" is burdened with an unrealistic plot that overwhelms its presentation. The story makes so many demands on your suspension of disbelief, that you no longer care about distinguishing realistic from outright implausible. We're asked to believe that in a post-cold war world, the US would blithely conspire to arm Japan with a nuclear-powered sub, then risk nuclear war when the Japanese refuse to return it. (A cold-war setting would have made more sense...but then would have required the script to deal with all those other countries besides the US that would have had problems with a nuclear-armed Japan, like China, both Koreas, Taiwan, India, Malaysia, Russia - with whom Japan is technically in a state of war - and maybe Australia.) Kaieda's decision to proclaim his boat an independent state are confusing - everybody else considers the boat to be Japanese, but Kaeida's motive for a ruse is unclear.

We Americans are the heavies of this story - and the threadbare plot seems to exist only to reveal that fact. Ham-handed Yanks can do no better than shooting their own eyes out while attempting to sink Yamato in order to protect their image as superpower. Americans pretty much sneer their way through the story (except when getting their ships sunk from under them) while the Japanese remain uniformly noble (though seldom looking Japanese). The story even undermines its most interesting character - Fukumachi, the man who doesn't buy anybody's crazy story, and navigates the battlefield seas of the Pacific in a less-than-super sub, but never gets the star billing he deserves.