Here is a really well-made, old-fashioned anti-war epic in a forthright and robustly enjoyable style from director and co-writer Arthur Harari. I can imagine David Lean or Steven Spielberg making this, or even John Sturges or J Lee Thompson, and it becoming the kind of movie that would get shown every Christmas on TV. It’s inspired by the life of Japanese intelligence officer Hiroo Onoda, who during the second world war had trained as a commando with orders to hold Lubang island in the Philippines and never to surrender or take his own life. Fiercely loyal to these original instructions, and refusing to believe the war was over, he held out as a hermit-guerrilla until 1974, as his ragtag unit died off or surrendered one by one, before he finally returned to Japan; one of the very last refuseniks.
This movie shows the deeply strange existence of Onoda (played as a young recruit by Yûya Endô and as an older man by Kanji Tsuda). He is a Crusoe of fanatical military spirit enacting his own private parody of war. Or maybe an absurdist farce that reveals what war actually is. In the early years, he and his unit roam around the island with the colonial zeal of explorers or schoolboys, making a map and solemnly naming peaks and riverbanks, the enemy’s assumed presence preventing them from collapsing into Lord-of-the-Flies disorder. Onoda talks with his comrades about how it feels to get one’s first killshot – a killshot that actually happens after the surrender in which Onoda stoutly disbelieves; that all-important technicality that would magically transform an act of war into an act of murder. Onoda unhesitatingly burns the Filipino farmers’ crops and shoots them: actions entirely justified by the war in his head, and also of course by the Filipinos’ retaliatory actions, which only confirm his view.
As the 1950s and 60s roll by, Onoda is alone and the authorities send his family to plead with him via a loudhailer; he thinks that’s just a trick. They leave him magazines and newspapers showing that the war is over. For Onoda it’s fake news. Yet he is no Mr Kurtz and he is more than a Mishima-type poseur: at the very end, there is something moving in his weary, impassive, uncomprehending childlike-old-man innocence.
• Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle is released on 15 April in cinemas.
