Definitely the best homoerotic Japanese WW2 POW camp film I have ever seen.

Positively brimming with homoerotic subtext in just about every scene. The epilogue seems meaningless, but most of this works very well.

A pretty interesting meditation on power, cruelty, duty, compassion. Some of the compositions are very striking, and rarely ostentatious. Conti and Kitano are the highlights. Bowie and Sakamoto hold their own, with one noteworthy flaw. Sakamoto's thick accent makes his English dialogue very difficult to understand. And often the music is just completely wrong for the scene. As for the film as a whole, I didn't love it and it didn't really resonate with me, but I found it frequently intriguing.

Odd film that seems to insist that you need to make a lot of assumptions to understand character motivations. The music is amazing, but ridiculously inappropriate most of the time - it would've been better suited to a horror/fantasy film, or maybe a sci-fi flick.

Long time since I've seen this film and would like to see it again for scoring purposes but as I recall it was pretty good.

An excellent character study with great performances.

A unique film dealing with East-West cultural admiration and homosexuality in WWII prisoner camps. Oshima is certainly different in that he seems very eager to criticize Japanese rather than celebrate their traditions like most. It's far from perfect, a bit dated and you could say it tries to bite on more than it can chew, but well worth a watch.

As much as I believe any film benefits from the appereance of David Bowie, it is far from enough to save this heavyhanded piece of wartime meditation.

Interesting characters and entertaining, but ends up wasting its characters; where it could've been character study, it becomes 'a day in the life of some POW's'. The acting was quite bad too, aside from Conti and some scenes of Kitano. The score, as well as the general atmosphere, were way too cheesy 80s to get me in the proper mindset. It never felt like I was watching a film set in the 40s.

yonetmen 2.dunya savasi sirasinda japon esir kampina dusen batili askerler uzerinden dogu-bati farkliliklarina deginirken japon toplumunun birey olmaktan ne kadar uzak oldugu elestirisini yapiyor. d.bowie'nin canlandirdigi karakterin japon komutani opme sahnesi ise komik oldugu kadar yontem olarak da sert bir protestoydu.

Unique but unsatisfying. At risk of sounding like a dumbass I don't get the whole final message (that sort-of monologue by Bowie) at all