Common Sense Note
Parents need to know that this movie includes violent, dark images of war and prisoner abuses. Characters curse briefly, look ravaged, suffer abuse at the hands of captors and from malaria, and participate in prolonged, rough-looking battles.
Families can discuss the possible reasons for this film's historical basis -- a raid in which U.S. military rescued 511 prisoners from a Japanese prison camp -- having remained largely untaught in U.S. classrooms and unheralded in popular culture. This fictionalized version adds a romance (between a soldier and a nurse) and tense relationships among U.S. soldiers, both rescuers and prisoners: what dramatic purposes do these storylines serve? How does the nurse's devotion to the major help connect action in two locations? How does the movie represent the Japanese and Filipino soldiers, in their very different relations to the U.S. troops?
Common Sense Review
Reviewed By: Cynthia Fuchs
THE GREAT RAID reaffirms familiar oppositions between bravery and iniquity, by way of a by-the-numbers WWII movie plot. "We all knew the idealistic notion of rescuing POWs far outweighed its strategic value." So intones narrator Captain Robert Prince (James Franco) to introduce the film's moral premise. It's January 1945, and 511 survivors of the Bataan Death March are wasting away in a prison camp in Philippines, and a team of 121 Army Rangers and Alamo Scouts means to recover them.
Adapted from William B. Breuer's The Great Raid on Cabanatuan and Hampton Sides' Ghost Soldiers, the movie emphasizes U.S. manly bonding. The Rangers' Lieutenant Colonel Henry Mucci (Benjamin Bratt) is working young Prince, planner extraordinaire. When they hear the camp's commander, Major Nagai (Motoki Kobayashi), will soon be executing all prisoners, under Tokyo's "Kill All" policy, Mucci and Prince make their move.
At the same time, the prisoners struggle to maintain hope after three years in the camp. Malarial Major Gibson (Joseph Fiennes) leads by example, physically weaker by the day but determined to survive until rescue. In part, he holds up because he's in love with his best friend's widow, Margaret (Connie Nielsen). A nurse in Manila, she helps to smuggle medicine into the camp. Despite and because of his noble gazing out the window while he thinks of Margaret (inciting gossip among his men), Gibson is visibly fragile, and so, his authority is both enhanced (because he's brave) and undermined (because he's delirious).
The film's representations of variously raced characters -- Japanese, the Filipinos, the Caucasians -- are careless. It's a portrayal necessitated and perpetuated by war: the enemy must look less than human. The film includes several solid Filipino soldiers, including the valiant Captain Juan Pajota (Cesar Montano), whose resistance army holds off a Japanese deployment to ensure the rescue mission's success. Still, the raid itself resorts to simplistic good and bad images, with no comprehension of the Japanese beyond what seems a singular desire to commit atrocities.
Families who like this movie may want to see other WWII movies, including Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, Paradise Road (1997), Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), Bataan with Robert Taylor or Back to Bataan, with John Wayne.
Rate It!
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Sexual ContentBrief threats against the nurse. |
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ViolencePrisoner abuse, executions, battlefield violence. |
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LanguageSoldiers curse in battle. |
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Social BehaviorU.S. heroes are good; Japanese captors are bad. |
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Drug/Alcohol/TobaccoCharacters smoke and drink. |
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