emuir-1 I found this movie in my collection yesterday and realizing that I had never watched it and having no idea where it came from, I decided to view it.The depiction of the two sides, US and Japanese was impartial, both sides were dealing with similar issues, both sides had doves and hawks, although the Japanese were portrayed as quite good looking, tidy and well mannered, whereas the Americans were portrayed as cigar chomping, sloppy, loud-mouths swigging drinks as they advocated a 'kick ass' policy toward the 'Nips'. Easy to see this was not an American production. James F. Byrne in particular was shown to be a hawk in favor of showing the world that the US had the upper hand. Having spent a couple of billion on developing the bomb, the hawks wanted the taxpayer to see where their money had gone, every last dime. Equally, the Japanese military, having never lost a war, were against the very idea of unconditional surrender as they really did not understand what it mean. The politicians toyed with the dilemma of whether to sacrifice tens of thousands of people, and what the result might mean in the future, which I found rather strange given that 100,000 people died in one night in the saturation bombing of Tokyo, and that the Japanese had been responsible for millions of dead, not to mention the barbarity toward civilian internees in SE Asia. After Germany's surrender, the Americans were able to concentrate on very heavy bombing of Japan, which was on its last legs, but the military wanted to go out with a bang.My biggest complaint with the DVD was the lack of captions which meant that I could not follow the English. Fortunately, half the film was in Japanese which was subtitled, so I could understand their point of view. The color was such that I kept wondering what was wrong with my TV set as it was coming and going, until I read later that it was in a mix of black and white newsreel footage, tinted black and white for the drama, and normal color for the interviews with survivors. I would rate the actual film higher than 6, but for the lack of captions and the awful color, which in my opinion was pretentious.

Phil Karn This is an outstanding production. And I think it no coincidence that it wasn't produced in the US.Over 50 years later, American emotions still run high about our use of nuclear weapons against Japan; the recent backlash against the Smithsonian exhibit is proof. This film is a nuanced, balanced, objective treatment with, as far as I can tell, remarkable historical accuracy. One sees just how simplistic and myopic the leaders of both sides were as they made (or avoided making) momentous decisions that affected the entire future of the human race. The one voice of reason, scientist Leo Szilard, is brushed off with hardly a hearing.This film is an effective indictment of our human propensity to place enormous powers in the hands of just a few individuals. I doubt any American producer could have made it.The film deftly mixes historical footage with re-enacted scenes using actors. Normally this sort of thing is rather jarring, but here it works. Even the transitions between the real Truman in newsreel footage and the actor playing him work well.

frankiehudson This is a brilliant, meticulous recreation of the events, both political and military, leading up to the tragic attack on Hiroshima in August 1945.Brilliant performance by Kenneth Welsh as the Missouri haberdasher President Truman, strangely ill-dressed throughout this film in his trademark double-breasted suit and multi-coloured shoes. Here, Truman is a simplistic, Forrest Gump style president grappling with enormous moral issues about using the new ‘gadget'.The excellent cinematography recreates the story in newsreel style footage, intercut with interviews with several people from the time. Also, shows the Japanese situation in Tokyo and the hardline military people on both sides.

Robert J. Maxwell A very good docudrama. But you must be in the mood. It's a low-budget enterprise, talky, and with no bravura performances. Why is it good, then? I guess it's because it makes certain demands on the intelligence and moral concerns of the viewer that few other renditions of this story have bothered to even attempt. For many years, the United States mythos handled the issue in the most simplistic way. The Japanese were all kamikazes, an invasion of the Japanese homeland would cost untold thousands of lives, so we had to nuke them. Recent revisionist history has given us another version of what happened. The Japanese were on their last legs and they knew it. They were sending out peace feelers through Sweden, Switzerland, and Russia. The United States ignored these because we wanted revenge, so we had to nuke them, and fast. This film illustrates exceedingly well both the Japanese and American sides of the issue, with restraint and intelligence. There are neither heroes nor villains here. And no easy shots are made at particular figures. We can often tell, in conventional flicks, who is good and who is bad by the simple expedient of seeing whether a given character is handsome or homely. We tend not to notice this casting sleight of hand in our own movies because the difference in appearance supports our own prejudices. (We want the villain to be ugly.) But if you want this trick to be in your face, take another look at "The Cranes are Flying," a Russian war movie in which the American officer looks and sounds like a fat bumbling idiot, while the Russian commander is ruggedly good-looking and wears a tolerant shrink-like smile. Such cheap symbolism certainly isn't committed here. The commander of the Japanese army, who wants to fight to the last man, is both attractive and highly principled. Truman may not be a brilliant thinker but he is down-home shrewd and up front about everything. (If there is a problem with the casting it is that the actor playing Curtis LeMay is too handsome and polite for the part. LeMay was a courageous, ruthless, cigar-smoking blowhard, whom no one but a mother would call handsome.)So why was the bomb dropped? Evidently through a series of stochastic misunderstandings -- in intentions, exchanges, even in the translation of particular words. And ultimately in the rush of the United States to end the war -- for any number of reasons, including strictly political ones -- and in the desire on the part of the Japanese to find some sort of honorable peace in which their emporer retained his sanctity, leading to actions too deliberate to satisfy the Allies.The film is at its weakest in posing a false dilemma. (Or maybe the historical characters were responsible.) (1) We invade the islands, or (2) we nuke them without warning. All the possibilities in between are dismissed for one reason or another. One of them, given short shrift, is the possibility of a naval blockade which would shut off all supplies and cancel all naval traffic from the islands. Japan having no natural resources worth mentioning, it would have been only a matter of time before it worked. Loss of life would have been minimal, and we would not have had to use the bombs -- plural, Nagasaki was destroyed only three days after Hiroshima. One of the reasons repeatedly brought up in favor of using the bomb is that the American taxpayer has put out two billion dollars for this gadget, and if it weren't used they would want to know why their money was spent developing it. (I don't know of any words adequate to describe this sort of logic.) A blockade, however, would have taken more time, which would have involved waiting, which is not our strong suit. Another weakness is that James F. Byrne was a personal friend of Truman's. Truman, uncertain and new to the presidency, looked at him as a font of wisdom. And Byrne was a devoted hawk. This isn't made entirely clear, but it was in fact the case.Well, who knows what we and the Japanese should have done? Easy enough to make retrospective judgments. However, they should perhaps be made anyway. Maybe knowing what went wrong last time will help us prevent things from going so terribly wrong next time.