3 days ago
‘Yukikaze' turns fabled warship into floating snoozefest
Inspirational stories are hard to come by in the history of the Pacific War, but Japanese filmmakers keep looking for them. 'Yukikaze,' by first-time feature director Toshihisa Yamada, recounts the tale of an Imperial Japanese Navy destroyer that survived so many battles, it came to be known as the 'lucky ship.'
This fabled vessel has also been valorized in a ghastly 1964 Shochiku film, 'Destroyer Yukikaze,' starring comic actor Isamu Nagato, and played a crucial (if perhaps ahistorical) role in Takashi Yamazaki's 'Godzilla Minus One' (2023). Yamada's movie has little in common with the former, save for the fact that both were produced with the cooperation of Japan's Defense Ministry and shy away from the ugly realities of combat.
'Yukikaze' gets off to a bracing start with a scene of bloodied bodies strewn around a Japanese ship during the Battle of Midway in 1942. However, this is a film that treats war mostly as an abstraction, plotted out on campaign maps and discussed in staid meetings among the navy's top brass. Battle scenes are confined mostly to the ship's bridge, interspersed with repetitive shots of gunners blasting away at oncoming aircraft.
Anyone hoping for an epic spectacle in the vein of Junya Sato's 'Yamato' (2005) or Yamazaki's 'The Eternal Zero' (2013) — both problematic though undeniably entertaining movies — will be disappointed. 'Yukikaze' is a more circumscribed affair with subpar visual effects that appear to have been rationed out by the millisecond.
In this fictionalized retelling full of scenes designed to appease the sensibilities of modern audiences, you could be mistaken for thinking the eponymous destroyer had been on a humanitarian mission. Yutaka Takenouchi stars as the benevolent Capt. Kazutoshi Terasawa (modeled on the real-life Masamichi Terauchi), who espouses progressive views about the sanctity of life and backs them up by sticking around during battles to rescue survivors from the sea.
He's assisted by a jovial cast of character actors and the strapping Kohei Hayase (Hiroshi Tamaki), the ship's senior enlisted sailor and de-facto alpha male. The latter becomes a father figure to new arrival Sota Inoue (Daiken Okudaira), whom he first meets after plucking him from the water at Midway. It's all awfully chummy, with little sense of hierarchy between the crew — and certainly none of the corporal punishment depicted in 'Yamato.'
The film gets some added sugar from a superfluous subplot about Kohei's younger sister, Sachi (Ami Touma). Kazutoshi also has a wife, Shizu (Rena Tanaka), and young daughter back home, though he spends far more time poring over a photo of his old naval academy pals who have all predeceased him.
It makes for a drab and soporific drama, but 'Yukikaze' ascends to true awfulness during its epilogue, in which it cycles through a series of possible endings, each more ill-advised than the last.
We get pixelated footage of the 1970 Osaka Expo to represent Japan's postwar recovery, a drone shot of the parade grounds at a present-day Maritime Self-Defense Force academy and a flash-forward revealing that Kazutoshi's daughter (played by Kasumi Arimura, in a big-name cameo) has grown up to become a rescue worker herself.
The nadir is a scene of the Yukikaze's crew waving from the deck of the ship as they deliver a message to viewers, the gist of which is: Hey, Japan! We're watching over you!
They may be disappointed to find that many of those viewers have already dozed off.
