Tora! Tora! Tora! is a 1970 Japanese-American biographical war drama film that dramatizes the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. The film was directed by Richard Fleischer, Toshio Masuda and Kinji Fukasaku, and stars an ensemble cast including Martin Balsam, Joseph Cotten, Sō Yamamura, E. G. Marshall, James Whitmore and Jason Robards.
The tora of the title is the two-syllable Japanese codeword used to indicate that complete surprise had been achieved. Japanese being a language with many homophones, it is a coincidence that tora also means "tiger".
Roger Ebert felt that Tora! Tora! Tora! was "one of the deadest, dullest blockbusters ever made" and suffered from not having "some characters to identify with." In addition, he criticized the film for poor acting and special effects in his 1970 review. Vincent Canby, reviewer for The New York Times, was similarly unimpressed, noting the film was "nothing less than a $25-million irrelevancy." Variety also found the film to be boring; however, the magazine praised the film's action sequences and production values. James Berardinelli, however, said it was "rare for a feature film to attain the trifecta of entertaining, informing, and educating." Charles Champlin in his review for the Los Angeles Times on September 23, 1970, considered the movie's chief virtues as a "spectacular", and the careful recreation of a historical event.
//note I have to wonder what were these critics smoking?! This is one of the best war movies ever made and definitely the best movie ever about the Pearl Harbor attack, perhaps even of the pacific war itself. Historically accurate to a fault and blessedly clean of all the idiotic Hollywood melodrama. The authenticity of the action and the story, the fair, balanced and nuanced depiction of both sides in the conflict from their own perspectives, not to mention the practical special effects which are literally jaw-dropping in today's age of kotaku-infested render farms... The respect it accords to both sides, the humaneness it gives them is almost unheard of in a war film that deals with a conflict that took place in living memory, and made by the winning side to boot ("Saving Private Ryan", I'm looking at you). It's an almost perfect historical movie with no frame wasted, to be watched breathlessly from start to finish, catapulting you straight into the minds of people who were there, who actually made the event happen - and Ebert was a shallow puffed-up moron with a bad hangover from the sixties when he wrote that infamous, idiotic review.
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