Glaring inaccuracies

But you would expect that from war propaganda.

Employing a newsreel tone, the voice-over narrator opens the film with the informative declaration “This story was not invented. The events you are about to see are based on actual incidents. The characters are based on real people”.

And yet there was no grandson of the Katipunan Supremo alive during WWII, much less involved in the campaigns on Bataan or Corregidor.

This film’s misuse of “real people” functioned in much the same way as did the Wild West's putative historical authenticity: by blurring the borders between fact and fiction, real people and dramatic characters, actual events and staged narratives, BtB, like the Wild West, obscured the fabrication of history and their narrative’s ideological agenda behind ostensible historical reportage.

The agenda of the film in a nutshell: it projects American colonial guilt onto the Japanese and then celebrates American liberation from these imperial oppressors as proof of the inherent goodness and inevitability of American freedom.