Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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162 of 172 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent and authentic down to the last detail....., May 6, 2001
I'm not a big war-movie buff any more (THE SEARCH FOR PRIVATE RYAN cured me) but this is a worthwhile film if you have an interest in WWII. TORA! TORA! TORA! is a documentary-type film. Think of it as a Stephen Ambrose book recorded live. The film is neither a glorified fifties war-film (IN HARMS WAY, BATTLE OF THE CORAL SEA), nor is it a Viet Nam noir-war film (PLATOON, THE DEER HUNTER). (Neither of which are particularly authentic.) TORA! TORA! TORA! recreates war from the perspective of news correspondent-participant-observer. The story is presented from both the Japanese and American viewpoints and it is presented like a History Channel film. It took the film crew several months to film TORA! TORA! TORA! I was living in Navy housing on Pearl Harbor at the time and a number of our friends and acquaintences found part-time jobs acting in the film. "Real" military pilots in-between rounds in Viet Nam flew some of the planes (this was 1969). Much of the architecture in Honolulu was vintage WWII era or earlier and the rest of the island was relatively unchanged from the 1940s. The terrain looked very much as it had when my father-in-law passed through on his way to Guadalcanel and later Iwo Jima. I cannot tell you the names of the aircraft (my husband could) but I was told that they used real aircraft from the period including the P40s the U.S. flew and the captured Zeros the Japanese flew. We drove up to Schoffield Barracks to look at the old airplanes lined up row on row. During the filming, one of these old planes crashed in a sugar cane field and burned up before the pilot could be rescued. The daily flights overhead, the real crashes, the reenactment of the destruction in the harbor, the daily flights in and out of Hickam as men and material destined for Viet Nam left and wounded and dead arrived--was all very weird. Well, this is an excellent film. The new PEARL HARBOR relies on all sorts of technology, but if you want to see how Hawaii really looked in 1941 and how the planes really looked, and how the crews really looked, and obtain some sense of how terrifying it was to be in Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 this is the film to see.
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75 of 79 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Confirmation? There's your confirmation!", January 12, 2004
I first saw Tora! Tora! Tora! (Tiger! Tiger! Tiger! in Japanese) in 1974, when I was 20 years old on Atlanta's Channel Two. As strange as this may sound, I have always liked movies about World War II. My stepfather had served in the Navy during the war and in fact he had joined the service shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which is the subject of this 2 hour and 25 minute-long Japanese-American 1970 production. This movie was directed by several directors including Toshio Masuda and Kinji Fukasuka, but the American version (yes, there is a Japanese version) gives the credit to veteran director Richard Fleischer. Based on Gordon W. Prange's "Tora! Tora! Tora!" and Ladislas Farago's "The Broken Seal", the film accurately depicts the events on both sides of the Pacific leading up to the stunning attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet on Sunday, December 7, 1941.
Even though it covers an 18-month period between Admiral Yamamoto's (Soh Yamamura) initial planning for Operation Hawaii and the attack itself, Tora! Tora! Tora! (the title refers to the code used to inform the Japanese that the Americans had been caught by surprise) never drags or seems dull. I learned, for instance, that Japanese Ambassador Nomura was a skilled and honorable diplomat who did not know what his country's military leaders were planning, and that he hoped to avoid war. I was also stunned by how General Walter C. Short (Jason Robards) was so preoccupied by the threat of sabotage from Hawaii's 125,000 Japanese inhabitants that he foolishly parked all the bombers and fighters in Hickam and Wheeler Fields in neat rows, supposedly to make them easier to guard but actually making them sitting ducks.
What amazed me about watching this movie is how clueless Pearl Harbor's defenders were on that Sunday morning. Though many people think the first shot of the Pacific War was fired by the Japanese, it was actually fired by the USS Ward on a Japanese midget submarine trying to sneak into the harbor. This happened roughly an hour before the first bomb fell on Battleship Row. I would have thought that the report of an unknown submarine being fired upon in a restricted area would have alerted the whole fleet. Wrong! American officers in Oahu were so certain that the Japanese would be spotted long before they could launch a strike that Captain James Earle (Richard Anderson) asks for confirmation before he tells his superiors. This does not make Adm. Husband E. Kimmel (Martin Balsam) very happy and I thought he was very angry that the Ward's initial report did not reach him in time.
The movie makes clear to the audience that history often hinges on small but significant details. Who would have thought that the fate of two great nations would be decided by a diplomat's slow typing speed, or that a report of a large radar blip off to the north of Oahu would be received with the phrase, "Well, don't worry about it."? It sounds like bad fiction but everything in this movie is based on historical fact.
Tora! Tora! Tora! has incredible battle scenes. Most of the aerial scenes were shot using either vintage planes or realistic replicas (because there are no flying Zero fighters, T-28 Texans were modified to look like the famous Japanese planes). The Navy actually allowed 20th Century-Fox to film in and around Pearl Harbor and rented a World War II era carrier that was to be decommissioned to serve as a stand in for the Japanese carrier. Clever editing, good miniature effects and carefully built live action sets give the illusion that one is actually reliving the Day of Infamy.
The 60th Anniversary Special Edition DVD was released around the same time as 2001's Pearl Harbor. It features an all new 20-minute documentary, director's commentary, the orginal theatrical trailer, and restores the movie to its original widescreen format. It has four audio tracks (English 4.1, the commentary, English Dolby Surround, French Mono), and subtitles in English and Spanish.
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38 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Day Of Infamy Recreated To Chilling Perfection, March 27, 1999
Many films attempt to tell true stories. One of the few that does justice to its subject is Tora! Tora! Tora!, a full-scale recreation of Pearl Harbor and the events leading up to the Day Of Infamy.Verisimilitude permeates throughout the film, from the full-sized mockups of Japanese aircraft carriers and the battleship Nagano to the Japanese Zero, Kate, and Val aircraft and American P-40 Warhawk fighters to the miniature and full-sized models of American battleships. Much of the combat footage was shot at Pearl itself and surrounding Air Force bases, while miniature work blends splendidly into the action. The enormous cast captures the exchanges of ideas and arguments among the various players involved in the attack. The most sympathetic player is Admiral Yamamoto. The film very nicely captures his lack of desire to go to war with an America that could not possibly lose a war with Japan based on the comparative industrial power of both nations. Also captured is the greater bloodthirstiness of fellow Imperial Japanese Navy officers, leading to a chilling scene during final pre-sortie debriefing when Yamamoto orders that the First Air Fleet abort the mission should negotiations with America succeed; fellow officers universally reject such an order, until Yamamoto hisses that any officer unwilling to follow should resign at once. Also captured are the motions of General Walter Short (Jason Robards) and Admiral Husband Kimmel (Martin Balsam), working to second-guess Japanese intentions minus intelligence data available to US Navy intelligence in Washington. Navy intelligence accurately guesses that intercepted Japanese diplomatic messages indicate Tokyo to be preapring for war, but there is never any indication that Pearl Harbor itself will be attacked. But it is, and the attack is brilliantly recreated. Battleships are hit by torpedos and bombs, planes parked together to prevent sabotage are slaughtered trying to take off, and the result is the greatest naval disaster suffered by American arms. But Admiral Yamamoto knows that what will result will be catastrophic for Japan, and the film ends with him staring into the sky - into the future. For sheer perfection, Tora! Tora! Tora! succeeds.
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