Review of "The Sun"
By sam / Date : 2006-03-05 15:27
By sam / Date : 2006-03-05 15:27
Director
Aleksandr Sokurov
Staring
Issei Ogata , Robert Dawson , Kaori Momoi , Shirô Sano , Shinmei Tsuji , Taijiro Tamura , Georgy Pitskhelauri
(0)
After reading what the film was about “Profiling the downfall of the Japanese Empire during the Second World War”, and reading the quote on the front of the case “A companion piece to DOWNFALL” I decided to check this film out.
(For those of you who haven’t seen it, Downfall is a film depicting Adolph Hitler’s last days during the fall of his regime at the end of World War II)
I found the phrase ‘companion piece’ a strange way to describe a movie, but I took from that a notion that The Sun was a film dealing with similar themes in a similar way, to a similar standard. How wrong I was.
I suppose it is true to say that the films do deal with similar subject matter, but this statement must be qualified but this one - Hirohito was a far less interesting man than Hitler. While Hitler was screaming at his military, or desperately trying to devise a way to keep his country and his dream alive, Hirohito was… taking a nap.
The film starts of very slowly, and in an annoyingly deliberate manor… then … it kinda stays that way. The Japanese are never afraid to turn you off a film before dragging you back in kicking and screaming, so I was expecting this torturous vision of a slightly odd man sitting in a bunker waiting to die to be a prelude to some real life affirming stuff, but alas, eventually it became clear there was nothing in this film to grab you, let alone pull you back from the edge of the shit-abyss it has been trying to push you into.
(For those of you who haven’t seen it, Downfall is a film depicting Adolph Hitler’s last days during the fall of his regime at the end of World War II)
I found the phrase ‘companion piece’ a strange way to describe a movie, but I took from that a notion that The Sun was a film dealing with similar themes in a similar way, to a similar standard. How wrong I was.
I suppose it is true to say that the films do deal with similar subject matter, but this statement must be qualified but this one - Hirohito was a far less interesting man than Hitler. While Hitler was screaming at his military, or desperately trying to devise a way to keep his country and his dream alive, Hirohito was… taking a nap.
The film starts of very slowly, and in an annoyingly deliberate manor… then … it kinda stays that way. The Japanese are never afraid to turn you off a film before dragging you back in kicking and screaming, so I was expecting this torturous vision of a slightly odd man sitting in a bunker waiting to die to be a prelude to some real life affirming stuff, but alas, eventually it became clear there was nothing in this film to grab you, let alone pull you back from the edge of the shit-abyss it has been trying to push you into.
sam