7.3 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
When Japan surrenders at the end of World War II, soldier Hiroo Onoda retreats into the jungles of the Philippines to continue the war himself for another 10,000 days.
Starring: Yűya Endô, Kanji Tsuda, Yűya Matsuura, Tetsuya Chiba, Shinsuke KatoForeign | 100% |
Drama | 48% |
War | 5% |
Adventure | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Japanese: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 16-bit)
Japanese: Dolby Digital 5.1 EX
Japanese: Dolby Digital 2.0 (224 kbps)
English
Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (B, C untested)
Movie | 4.0 | |
Video | 4.5 | |
Audio | 4.5 | |
Extras | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
They say that truth is stranger than fiction, but does that maxim still hold true for what a filmmaker overtly states is "fictionalized truth"? The story of Hiroo Onoda has been told before, including by Onoda himself, but kind of ironically given its Japanese roots, it's always had something of a Rashomon quality to it, in that details may have rather significantly varied depending upon whom was doing the telling. That may have played into co-writer and director Arthur Harari's decision to not hew completely strictly to a perhaps debatable historical record, which may bother some armchair fact checkers, but which probably doesn't seriously impede this film's rather startling account of one of the infamous "Japanese holdouts", soldiers (typically in isolated locations) who either refused to surrender or who simply didn't believe World War II was over.
Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Dark Star Pictures with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.85:1. The IMDb lists a Red capture at a source resolution of 5K, which leads me to believe this may have had a 4K DI. One way or the other, despite some overt stylization of the image, including noticeable if tightly resolved digital grain and sometimes kind of anemic contrast, detail levels are consistently strong throughout the presentation. The contrast issue can lead to a slightly blanched looking image which is probably most noticeable in some of the outdoor jungle footage. A few nighttime or dimly lit scenes, including a couple of cave sequences that seem to have been graded towards blue, may not offer the same excellent levels of fine detail, but it's a minimal deficit. Close-ups provide more than ample fine detail levels throughout the presentation.
Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle features a nicely immersive DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track that benefits from the glut of outdoor material the film offers, with a resultant surplus of ambient environmental sounds populating the side and rear channels. An evocative score by a variety of composers (the music featurette gets into the almost preposterous number of international producing entities involved in the film, which in turn resulted in a similarly global array of musicians working on the project) also helps to regularly engage the surround channels. Dialogue is rendered cleanly and clearly throughout. English subtitles are forced.
- The Long Night (HD; 22:03)
- Haiku "Conspiracy Theory" (HD; 8:34)
- Silent Solo (HD; 8:33)
- The Music (HD; 31:10)
- The Image (HD; 25:17)
- The Script (HD; 37:13)
Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle clocks in at close to three hours, and while that helps to establish the veritable "slog" Onoda put himself through, it may also work against the film's narrative momentum, which may also have some inherent "interruptions" in that the film has to traverse a rather wide timespan to even provide the basics of the story. Still, this is an amazing piece that, while arguably not 100% "factual", still is viscerally compelling and really almost frankly unbelievable at times. Technical merits are solid and the supplements are unusually in depth and enjoyable. Highly recommended.
(Still not reliable for this title)
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