The Great Raid

[phanatic]

Saw The Great Raid yesterday.

I was actually fairly impressed. I thought the bits leading up to the raid dragged a bit, there was this big subplot taking up about half the screen time about Maggie Utinsky's smuggling ring, which was just distracting.

The rest was very well done. The raid itself was excellent, very accurate, with the

Comments

[obifu]

Excellent news, I was a bit worried about some of the buzz on The Great Raid, based on some reviews. I really enjoyed the book Ghost Soldiers, so I'm glad they got it right. The details on the Filipino Guerrillas and the truthful presentation of the Japanese brutality towards POWs was excellent. Glad to see the movie didn't mess it up.

On the Hiroshima point, do you think we can defeat the Islamic Jhadists without nuking Mecca?

[phanatic]

There's an excellent scene where the Japanese at the bridge the Filipinos are holding get desperate and banzai-charge.

Right into the interlocked fields of fire of two watercooledBrowning .30s.

On the Hiroshima point, do you think we can defeat the Islamic Jhadists without nuking Mecca?

You know, that would be an excellent experiment, but I'm not sure I want to see it carried out. On one hand, the hajj is one of the seven pillars, if you don't do it, your salvation is in doubt. And on the other hand, Islam is very fatalist, so if Mecca and that big meteor vanish in a ball of nuclear plasma, well, obviously Allah wanted it to happen that way. But on the gripping hand, that sure could be a lot of really pissed-off (justifiably so, too) Muslims.

[a_motley_fool]

I thought there were five pillars, unless you've added stoneing women and jihad to the list.

[phanatic]

Or I confused it with Buddhism. Or something.

[interdictor]

The way I see it, every single one of those people who was killed as a result of the atomic bombs was going to die one day anyway.

You know, I'm sure rangers carry mortars if they expect the op to require them -- not sure about the 60mm though. I thought it would be the 42.

[phanatic]

42, I guess. But either way, I'd have expected them to have one or two, and I'd have used them to drop some rounds right on the guard barracks. If I had two, I'd use the second one to drop rounds around the perimeter of the tank shed. Not gonna do dick to the tanks, but if someone has to run through a curtain of mortar fragments to get into his tank to start driving it, the bazooka I brought along might turn out to be superfluous.

[interdictor]

I haven't seen the movie yet. I'm gonna like it?

[phanatic]

You're probably gonna like the last 40 minutes or so. Basically all the bits where the Japanese camp guards are getting completely fucking eviscerated by .30 rifle fire.

[boffo]

I agree with everything you said, but still think The Great Raid fails as a movie. While the last half-hour is pretty good, nothing happens before that.

I would recommend people rent it, then just watch the ending.

My review.

[phanatic]

I can just imagine the conversation between the writer and a development executive that led to this:

Development Executive: This movie would sell better if it had some women in it.
Writer: But every character's a soldier.
DE: How about you put in a sexy machine-gun toting commando? That would be hot.
W: That's a terrible idea.
DE: Okay, okay. Add a subplot that involves a sexy woman in Manilla.
W: Well, I guess there were some women in the Filipino resistance.
DE: Make sure she's white.

Well, it's not like they made her up. But yah, I agree with you: there's a lot of nothing happening until stuff starts to happen. They really should have dropped that entire subplot and dealt with the intelligence gathering, the Fillipino guerillas, and so forth.

[theswede]

They could have skipped the second nuke though; considering what an operational disaster that was, it'd have been a better choice anyway.

[phanatic]

Bah. Even *after* the second bomb, the military *attempted a coup to depose the Emperor* to keep him from announcing a general surrender.

And 'operational disaster'? Diverting to a secondary target in the event the primary was visually obscured was how things were done, and the bomb detonated midway between two Mitsubishi arms factories.

[theswede]

They'd have attempted that after five bombs too, and the emperor would have surrendered after the first.

I was more referring to the launch with knowledge of defective fuel tanks, highly irregular (and against all safety regulation) last minute soldering of the assembled bomb, and the intent on part of the crew to drop the bomb blind over Nagasaki; that it took out arms factories was nothing but luck, the crew targetted a stadium in a last minute hole in the clouds.

That's operational disaster, even if the *results* were lucky, and took out the majority of the west friendly population of Japan ...

[phanatic]

highly irregular (and against all safety regulation) last minute soldering of the assembled bomb,

How can you have a 'highly irregular' occurrence when what you're doing has never been done before? It was either solder it at last minute or risk detonation on a failed takeoff; 'one-point safe' wasn't even in the vocabulary yet.

and the intent on part of the crew to drop the bomb blind over Nagasaki

They were going to drop it on radar, not blind.

[betternewthings]

i wonder why everyone gets such a hardon about the a-bomb. the napalm bombings were much, much worse.