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Official Website for the film: Miramax.com FILM LIST
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The Great Raid (August 12, 2005) This movie is one of those "coulda, shoulda" films for me. It could have been so much better. It should have been so much better. The story itself--the rescue of POWS--is a great one, but the movie ends up being far too dull. A shame. Here's my column, which appeared in newspapers the weekend of August 12, 2005. Saving POWs in The Great Raid Popular interest in World War II has surged in recent years. Thanks to Steven Spielberg's searing Saving Private Ryan, HBO's gritty Band of Brothers, and Stephen Ambrose's best-selling books, D-Day and Citizen Soldiers, events and personalities of the war in Europe are deeply engrained in our collective psyche. But what of the war in the Pacific? Millions of American soldiers waged a bitter struggle there against the Japanese for over three years. Yet their collective stories seem like a neglected stepchild in popular attention lately. A new film, The Great Raid, hopes to change that. Set in the Japanese-occupied Philippines in early 1945, it depicts a group of Army Rangers who penetrated deep into Japanese territory in an attempt to rescue over 500 American POWS. Survivors of the Bataan Death March, they had been held in horrific conditions in the Cabanatuan camp for close to three years. From a high of 50,000, their numbers had dwindled through disease, abuse, and deportations to slave labor camps in Japan. As the American forces slowly regained control of the Philippines in early 1945, these prisoners were in very real danger of being slaughtered by their captors. The Rangers were charged with saving them before that could happen. It's a tale of nobility, and heroism. A story that's almost too good to be true. But it is true. Well, mostly. Q. Were the film's main characters actual historical figures?
But Major Daniel Gibson (Joseph Fiennes) the key figure in the camp, is mostly fictional. His character, though, helps embody the most noble characteristics of the prisoners (he fights to get medicine smuggled into the camp) as well as the most despairing (he's succumbing himself to malaria, a huge killer among camp inmates.) Whether or not he'll survive is one of the key subplots of the film. Q. What about Margaret Utinsky. Was she real? Q. Were the Japanese POW camps worse than German POW camps? This was in part because the Japanese military viewed surrender as a deeply dishonorable act, and thus treated surrendering enemies with contempt and abuse. Cases of American POWS being beaten, deliberately starved, or even beheaded were not unusual. But not all deaths were due to cruelty. After their 1942 victory in the Philippines, the Japanese had three to four times as many prisoners as they had anticipated. Their hastily constructed POW camps became horribly overcrowded. In the weeks after the surrender, diseases ran rampant among the American and Filipino POWS, and some three to four hundred died every day. Q. In the film, Colonel Mucci seems reluctant to allow Filipino
guerillas to help in the operation. True? Filipino loyalty to the American army was intriguing, though, since relations between the two were often strained under American occupation (the U.S. ruled the Philippines as a colony from 1902-1946.) But after the Japanese takeover, the Filipinos apparently decided that, as landlords go, the Japanese were infinitely worse than the Americans, and began waging a fierce insurgency campaign against their new occupiers. Q. Did one American soldier panic at the last minute, and almost
ruin the raid? Q. What's a good book for more info? These books are also, to be brutally honest, better than this film. The Great Raid tries hard, and means well, but never really captures the captivating drama of this real-life event. But if we're still waiting for a great movie about the Pacific War, one that can help reawaken popular interest in it, it's nice to know we've got some great books to help fill the gap.
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James Franco and Benjamin Bratt: |