...with nice pan and scan shots, colour and camera works and so on, based on several true stories, melded together. It's like watching ... Fargo come together with some Bridge of Spies and South by Southwest kinda ... very classic feel - the shortcomings are, well, in a classical movie about/featuring/having the backdrop of the WW2 atrocities essentially you can be violent and these days more violent - so the violence that there is in this movie already - that'd raise a few eyebrows in the 70ies and even in the 90ies, but you can't be realistically violent.
Mistakes:
dropping a clothed dead security officer out of the train window - that wouldn't happen at this time, they'd strip him naked first - to ensure he'd die and to slow down identification, as people - especially in the context of war and counterintelligence, used to be identified by their clothing back then
torturing people with electricity without taking any precautions with some amateur-looking electric chair contraption - the only torturing they'd be doing is being in that electric chair themselves, considering anything higher than 30 milliamps can be instantly deadly for a human and Japanese/Manchukuo killing their only counterintelligence source would instantly result in very bad stuff happening to the officer who would've killed him
very classical "spies sit together in a cinema" scene ... and other similar "mistakes" or rather - artistic choices based on the overall style.
Nice and definitely worth a rewatch.
Mistakes:
dropping a clothed dead security officer out of the train window - that wouldn't happen at this time, they'd strip him naked first - to ensure he'd die and to slow down identification, as people - especially in the context of war and counterintelligence, used to be identified by their clothing back then
torturing people with electricity without taking any precautions with some amateur-looking electric chair contraption - the only torturing they'd be doing is being in that electric chair themselves, considering anything higher than 30 milliamps can be instantly deadly for a human and Japanese/Manchukuo killing their only counterintelligence source would instantly result in very bad stuff happening to the officer who would've killed him
very classical "spies sit together in a cinema" scene ... and other similar "mistakes" or rather - artistic choices based on the overall style.
Nice and definitely worth a rewatch.