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.

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

An excellent character study with great performances.

Positively brimming with homoerotic subtext in almost every scene. The epilogue seems meaningless, but it mostly works.

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.

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.

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

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.