Blown Up in Translation
The new Japanese action film "Midnight Eagle" has a certain artistry, but its distaste for the bounds of believability is astounding. Underdeveloped action films, it seems, know no language barrier. Incredibly, the film suffers from the translation foibles that afflict many foreign stars when they attempt to cross over into the English market — despite speaking in its native tongue. "Midnight Eagle" tries to impose the vocabulary of Hollywood blockbusters on a cast and screenplay that are simply not up to the task.
Juxtaposed among beautiful shots of its conflicted protagonist are poorly realized fight scenes and badly timed chases. The producers of "Midnight Eagle" received the cooperation of the Japan Air Self-Defense Forces, the Ministry of Defense, and the Ground Self-Defense Forces to realize the film (a first in Japanese cinematic history), but despite the panoramic vistas and insight into power this assistance provides, the film repeatedly fails the plausibility test.
In a convoluted plot that tries to capitalize on the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Tokyo is at risk of destruction when an American bomber loaded with a nuclear missile crashes in the Japanese Alps. The Japanese Special Forces try to disarm the bomb, but they are repeatedly thwarted by unnamed Asian forces. Luckily, these evildoers weren't planning on the presence of a pacifist photographer and his journalist friend on the mountain.
Yuji Nishizaki (Takao Osawa) is a disillusioned war photographer whose work in the Middle East has left him unable to continue taking the photographs that made him famous. He leaves his wife and his small child, Yu (Hiroki Sahara), to escape in the mountains of Japan's northern alps and photograph the sky. While he's up there, his wife dies and her sister, Keiko Arisawa (Yuko Takeuchi), also a journalist, takes charge of the boy. Keiko's decision and her subsequent disdain for Yuji are poorly executed, considering the many days she leaves Yu unattended in her apartment while she chases international war criminals. By a convenient twist of the cinematic gods, Keiko is assigned to interrogate a wounded "East Asian" agent and his pregnant, non Japanese-speaking girlfriend, who hold the key to disarming the bomb that only the Japanese government — and now her brother-in-law — know about.
Fight sequences between armed, camouflaged soldiers and pacifist journalists trapped in bright ski jackets on a snow-locked mountain simply do not work. All of the nonviolent heroes eventually take up weapons to defend themselves and their country, but this has a slighter impact than director Izuru Narushima would like. "Midnight Eagle" tries to make a case that the camera is mightier than the automatic rifle, and while that might flirt with the poetic, it simply doesn't hold up on the big screen — at least, not in this iteration. In its consideration of the unfortunate necessity of self-defense, the film only seems to suggest that countries with military complexes still recovering from record devastation might be at a disadvantage in the production of war films.
In the final moments of the film, which drag on interminably, the dreaded bomb ticks away, marking 2 1/2 hours until Tokyo's demise. The prime minister puts our heroes on hold, telling them that his team will call back with the unlock code when there are 10 minutes left until detonation. In the meantime, "Midnight Eagle" continues with its halfhearted bullet assault on the protagonists, but at this point, is it the fear of these ominous East Asians that should plague the Japanese people or the fact that their prime minister's procrastination problem is a bit of a security risk?
mkeane@nysun.com
