A new Hollywood war movie due for worldwide release in August may offend Japanese audiences because of its graphic depiction of brutalities committed by Japan’s Imperial Army during World War II, movie executives said on Monday.
The $50-million movie, entitled The Great Raid and bankrolled by United States media giant Miramax, stars Hollywood actor Benjamin Bratt and popular Filipino action-movie star Cesar Montano.
It chronicles the daring exploits of a group of US soldiers that slips behind enemy lines in the closing days of World War II to rescue more than 500 American prisoners of war in the northern Philippine city of Cabanatuan.
The rescue of the prisoners of war in Cabanatuan on January 8 1945 is regarded as one of the most daring missions in American military history.
Hampton Sides, author of Ghost Soldiers, one of two books on which the movie is based, admitted that the celluloid version could offend Japanese viewers since there is no sugar-coating in depicting the brutality of the Imperial Army soldiers.
”It would have been very easy to sugar-coat what happened to appeal to the Japanese market or change the movie to make it more appealing to the Japanese,” he told a press briefing in Manila, where Miramax was promoting the movie.
”That’s not happening in this movie,” he added. ”You’ll see that the Japanese were depicted very graphically and very honestly.”
Marty Katz, the film’s producer, added that some of the Japanese actors who were approached to play various roles in the movie found it ”a bit too much for them” and turned down the offer.
”But the actors that we chose, who were all Japanese, played the role fairly,” he said.
Katz said the film was shot for three months in Australia and Shanghai in 2002 instead of the Philippines because the American actors did not feel safe in the south-east Asian country due to concerns over terror attacks. — Sapa-DPA