Ningen no jôken (The Human Condition III - A Soldier's Prayer)
Experiencing all of the Human Condition trilogy up to the end is a completely devastating. Powerful and haunting, the memory of this film will get under your skin. Living through this movie is like having shared the memories of those countless souls who have suffered such extreme ordeals throughout the course of human history.
I'm not quite sure how this series of movies does it, but somehow it keeps enticing you along for nearly ten hours of repeated disappointments. Perhaps it's because the hero keeps sticking to his idealism, and the film is at times imbued with such hope that you lift your head up again after each defeat. Or maybe the longer you spend with the protagonist and share his desires to just get back home with his wife and share a decent life, the more and more you pull for him, and the stronger you share his feelings the more struggles and tragedies you are able to live through with him. You need to see how the film will end. And I won't spoil the ending, but it is powerful. And it could never have been so powerful if you had not gone through all of the ordeals in this long running time.
The trilogy also does a sort of interesting thing with showing you both sides of things in war. For instance, the first installment of the trilogy shows the protagonist and the Japanese running a POW camp to hold Chinese POWs and the attempts of the POWs to escape. Later in the third installment of the trilogy we see the progatonist get caught as a POW and be put in a POW camp himself. And we see him and his fellow POWs trying to escape. And even in the second part, there are people trying to escape from the boot camp or for the battle itself. No matter which context he is in, the protagonist tries to maintain an attitude of kindness and equality for people. A disdain for selfishness, war, and equality. But often he is thwarted through just plain evil people, or through lack of communication or bureaucracy. There are good people, bad people, and indifferent people out there, but somehow the system seems to cater to the bad ones more often than not.
The themes in the film are universal, but it works because the places and big events were real. This is kind of like a great WWII history lesson for Americans if you watch it as well, because you get to see and hear about different events and timelines and how Japan was reacting to things that were going on in other parts of the global war.
Rating: 10/10