This was a movie recommended to me by Nick Newman (follow him on twitter here and read his writings on The Film Stage). He won last week’s #ScreenshotGame, so if you want to torture me (or enlighten me, both are acceptable) then play along on the gmanreviews official Facebook Page and keep your fingers nimble to guess right.

Jack Celliers (David Bowie) has been accepted into a POW camp in Java, Japan, after surrendering to the enemy. Jack is reteamed with an old war friend, Col. John Lawrence (Tom Conti), in the camp run by Capt. Yonoi (Ryuichi Sakamoto).

Did time ruin this movie or is it just not my thing? I’ve seen very few David Bowie films from the 80s, at the peak of his popularity, and there aren’t many of them that I would call good. He’s always been that crazy actor that does a lot of science fiction work and tends to be odd for the sake of being odd. While I do admire his talents in his music career, and I don’t want to be brazen enough to call him a bad actor, I do feel that a lot of his early film choices never seemed to work out well for me as a viewer.

A while back I used to find myself frustrated trying to put into words how an overall dull film can be good, then a friend of mine reminded me of this simple fact: a movie’s purpose is to entertain, therefore if it fails to accomplish that goal then the movie has failed and that’s the end of the story. While I don’t think it’s as black and white as that I do feel that that statement does have something to it. As a person that sees so many movies I feel that I know how to look at certain aspects of the film separate and apart from the story being told and either commend them or criticize them. But how much does it matter if the story of the film is bad? Or, even worse, if there’s a good story but it’s put together with such horrible filmmaking that it makes it too difficult to find the story that’s in there?

This movie I feel doesn’t have a bad story, but the aspects of the story that I enjoyed were overshadowed by how much I didn’t care for a lot of the acting and lack of understanding of the film’s characters. Now maybe I’m just a bit dense, or wasn’t in the right mood for the movie I just couldn’t get it. The movie wasn’t set in a camp like that of Rescue Dawn where it was clear that the prisoners and guards were completely separate, and it isn’t like Shawshank Redemption where you see a bit of friendliness (even though it’s all leveraged) between the guards and the prisoners. This movie is one where in one scene you’ll watch the guards showing some respect to the prisoners and the next they enforce it with the strictest usage. I think that the worst of the lot is Sgt. Hara (Takeshi Kitano) who tends to act without consulting his superior, Capt. Yonoi. This just causes me to a bit curious about why the prisoners aren’t more confused about their role in the camp. They go out and work and at the same time they can call an audience with the Captain of the camp and speak to him with a level of familiarity that just seems odd to me.

Then we have the introduction of the unwavering Maj. Jack ‘Strafer’ Celliers, who Capt. Yonoi takes some interest in and would like to have an experiment with in his camp. He wants to install Celliers into his camp to see how basically he responds to his prison and the results are more than he could ever expect. I’m actually surprised that Jack put so much effort into being defiant rather than escaping, which he did try eventually but I feel that his main purpose was the just sit there and spit in Yonoi’s face at every possible chance. The problem with this is that I don’t feel like Celliers’ efforts happened to inspire anyone; sure Lawrence supported Celliers anytime he could but it was never widely accepted by the prisoners and that just left me to watch Jack be an ass by himself which didn’t really amount to much.

Nearing the end of the film when we finally get the line, “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence,” I don’t really get the motivation other than it being a whimsically influenced decision that stands on its own and never really has a massive impact on the story or the characters.

As I said, maybe it’s that I just didn’t get it as many people would say of certain films throughout history. However, I just have to chalk this movie into the negative side of the Criterion Collection that’s there and never really does anything on an emotional level.

IMDB says 7.1/10
Rotten Tomatoes says 79%
I say 4.5/10