Review of Hell in the Pacific

Introduction

Filmed in 1968 this movie tells the tale of 2 soldiers stranded together on a deserted tropical island in the Pacific, one American (Lee Marvin) and the other Japanese (Toshirô Mifune), who must put aside their differences if they are to stand a chance of surviving. Setting aside their differences might be harder than they think as not only are they divided by war but also language and culture.

This premise for a movie is as old as the hills, almost as old as this movie even :) so how does it measure up some 33 years after it’s release?

Video

A full frame picture fills your screen with this one, although why is anyone’s guess as the movie starts out in a widescreen 2.35:1 aspect ratio then magnifies to full frame once the titles are out of the way. This is pretty standard for movies shown on TV and not what I expect of DVD. The overall sharpness of the picture is let down by a few instances of noticeable enconding artefacts and a general drabness in the colours. All things considered though it’s about as good as you could expect even if it is full frame.

Audio

The Stereo soundtrack is very poor with a large number of sounds coming across far too echoey and completely unrealistic, especially any sound effects involving water.

The music in this movie is just dreadful seeming to be mostly comprised of random banging and crashing of various instruments and musical styles in an attempt to convey emotion that left me reaching for the volume control. Oddly enough it’s the orchestration which comes across by far the best in terms of audio quality.

Features

Here we get a slideshow of stills (showing much more vivid colours than the actual movie presentation itself) and a selection of biographies / production notes. Nothing worth bothering with whatsoever.

Conclusion

Most definitely NOT my kind of movie at all. It covers no interesting ground whatsoever and after watching it I felt as if I’d wasted what was a very long 98 minutes.

The movie starts out with next to no dialogue and sees the a series of mind games between the 2 men where they taunt each other. I would have thought that survival would have been first on the list of things to do but perhaps it’s a difference in time where nowadays wars are a more distant memory in our society. As the film moves on and they inevitably move closer to a friendship it never seems to gel at all. Not once did I ever think that they were understanding each other and the attempts and forging the relationship throughout the film just didn’t work for me.

The lack of dialogue places more reliance on the music and as I’ve mentioned previously this was largely a confusing mess and further confused the issue of what the 2 men were feeling and thinking.

I must also say that the ending of the movie is probably one of the most unfulfilling and generally poorest excuses I’ve seen in a movie. Overall a week DVD package and a very poor movie.