Fairly good film, but nothing to be excited about

I can't help comparing this film to the 1968 film Admiral Yamamoto in which the internationally acclaimed actor Toshiro Mifune played the titular character. Both films are fairly good. This film covered a longer period of Yamamoto's life, starting from the early 1930s till his death in 1943. The film also spent much more time on the political intrigues going on in Japan at the time – especially between the Navy and the warmongers in the Army.

The film portrayed Yamamoto as a basically decent man, who did his best to oppose the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy, since that ultimately would have to lead to war with the United States. Unlike some Japanese war films (including Yamato (2005), which for obvious reasons appended the atomic bombings months after the ship's sinking to the ending), this film was relatively honest and did not portray the Japanese as victims or glorify the sacrifices of its soldiers in what was basically a war of aggression that they themselves started. By contrast, Michael Bay's awful Pearl Harbor appeared to give viewers the impression that the only reason Japan started the War was because the US refused to let them have oil! This film carefully noted that Japan was bogged down in the war with China, and to break the deadlock it moved into French Indo-China, and that in turn led to heightened sanctions by the US and Britain. On the whole I find the part before the Pacific War more interesting and informative. Also, unlike the 1968 film, this one dealt more with Yamamoto's home life, thus enabling more focus on his "human" side. The acting – as one would expect from Japanese films with international distribution – was uniformly good.

Based on my own knowledge, the film was fairly historically accurate, with the few inaccuracies rather inconsequential and perhaps due mainly to cinematic reasons. If there was any whitewashing of Japan's culpability in starting the Pacific War, that was largely through omission. The film did not glorify the War but affirmed the bravery and loyalty of Japan's officers and soldiers. It showed Yamamoto as being opposed to war with the US, but did not highlight that Japan was already at war elsewhere. It was also charitably silent on Japanese atrocities in China and later in Southeast Asia.

One shortcoming of this film was that once Japan moved towards the attack on Pearl Harbor, the script started to go by the numbers. All significant events and battles were mentioned and a few scenes were shown – Singapore, the Philippines, Midway (Coral Sea was not shown), Guadalcanal, the Marianas, and so on – but each was given only scanty treatment before moving to the next. The film really started to speed up but the treatment began to get superficial, and there was hardly anything that anyone who had read about WWII had not already known.

Lastly, for those that watch this film for the battle scenes: there were actually very few. The 1968 film used a lot of documentary footage and stock footage from other war films. Here, I believe it was mostly CGI. There were shots of the Negato and Yamato (Yamamoto's flagships at various times) at anchor. There were also shots of the fleet at sea. But there were few battle scenes – the carrier battle at Midway lasted at most five minutes or so and then the carriers were shown burning. Most of the battles were seen in the air with only a few planes taking part on either side.