In “Apocalypse ’45,” we see images of World War II — the last six months of it, when our forces were engaged in a grisly death-throes battle with the Japanese in the Pacific — that are
American soldiers blast their flamethrowers into caves, the oily fire whipping around like something out of a dragon’s mouth. We’re shown the bombing of Tokyo from a mile over the city, the bombs exploding like clusters of orange dots on the map-like green landscape below. On Okinawa, grenades burst into mounds of curling black smoke, and we see a Japanese woman on the Mariana Islands jump off a cliff rather than allow herself to be taken alive. As for the city of Hiroshima, filmed seven months after the atomic bomb was dropped there, it’s a flattened, debris-strewn hellscape of desolation that looks like it could have been filmed yesterday. The documentary is also filled...
American soldiers blast their flamethrowers into caves, the oily fire whipping around like something out of a dragon’s mouth. We’re shown the bombing of Tokyo from a mile over the city, the bombs exploding like clusters of orange dots on the map-like green landscape below. On Okinawa, grenades burst into mounds of curling black smoke, and we see a Japanese woman on the Mariana Islands jump off a cliff rather than allow herself to be taken alive. As for the city of Hiroshima, filmed seven months after the atomic bomb was dropped there, it’s a flattened, debris-strewn hellscape of desolation that looks like it could have been filmed yesterday. The documentary is also filled...
- 8/15/2020
- by Owen Gleiberman
- Variety Film + TV
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