Customer Reviews

Tora! Tora! Tora! (Widescreen Special Edition in THX)

5 star:		(83)
4 star:		(28)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Tora! Tora! Tora! is the single best movie ever made about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It features excellent performances from such actors as James Whitmore, E.G. Marshall, Jason Robards and Martin Balsam. The special effects are far more convincing than what's in modern movies. It also has some of the best movie music of all time. Best of all, the movie shows the sheer complacency on the U.S. side that enabled the Japanese to successfully mount the surprise attack.

Tora! Tora! Tora! is far superior to any other movie ever made about Pearl Harbor. In fact, it is one of the absolute best movies ever made about World War II. It is a classic motion picture in its own right.

On a scale of 1 to 5, it really merits a 10.

Based on research of Gordon Prange, author of "At Dawn We Slept", Tora! Tora! Tora! is a very accurate portrayal of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

There have been several treatments of the famous battle (as one-sided as it was), including the recent (and crummy) "Pearl Harbor" (2001). This is the best.

As other reviews have pointed out, the attack was an extremely successful one for the Japanese from a military standpoint. By 1941, the only check on Japanese expansion in the Pacific was the United States Navy. Yamamoto's plan was bold and creative, but it depended a lot upon luck, as the film and the book point out. The United States had installed a radar facility that operated part-time, and did detect the first wave of incoming Japanese planes. The US was more concerned with sabotoge, and parked their planes closely together. The Japanese mini-submarine that was detected and sunk off Pearl Harbor should have raised alarms, but didn't.

It all points to a fundamental principal of war. Everyone got complacent. We thought Pearl was too far from Japan to attract an attack of that magnitude. We thought we would see the fleet or at least the Japanese planes long before they would present a threat. Our technology (radar) provided an extra safeguard, but wasn't properly used. Our cracking of the Japanese diplomatic code provided an extra sense that we would know of an attack prior to it happening.

I've read the transcript of the congressional inquiry into the attack that was undertaken in the late 1940s. It is fascinating. They point out one of the reasons we were complacent. There had been 'war warnings' sent out several times in late fall 1941, warning of an imminent Japanese attack somewhere in the Pacific. Nothing happened. This bred a laissez-faire attitude toward imminent attack.

The only thing that saved the US Navy was the US carriers were at sea, and that main target of the Japanese escaped unharmed, a fact that was to be of great importance to the subsequent conduct of the war.

Some reviewers here have expressed surprise that the US was so badly fooled. One reviewer here calls the US's actions 'slipshod and arrogant'. Huh? We prepared for the danger that we expected, not something nobody believed could have occurred. 'Blithely oblivious'? Again, incorrect, as the proceedings of the congressional investigation have pointed out. 'Dry and boring'? What movie did that reviewer watch? 'Incomprehensible decision' to park the planes closely together? How about the dangers of sabotage? 'We didn't expect an attack'? Not accurate at all. The US was painfully aware of the danger Japan presented.

The US attitude is understandable, though, when you realize they were viewing a far-off war in Europe, and no one then imagined a war in their own backyard. It is hard to expect the unexpected.

Very Highly recommended!

I first saw Tora! Tora! Tora! (Tiger! Tiger! Tiger! in Japanese) in 1974, when I was 20 years old on Atlanta's Channel Two. As strange as this may sound, I have always liked movies about World War II. My stepfather had served in the Navy during the war and in fact he had joined the service shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which is the subject of this 2 hour and 25 minute-long Japanese-American 1970 production.

This movie was directed by several directors including Toshio Masuda and Kinji Fukasuka, but the American version (yes, there is a Japanese version) gives the credit to veteran director Richard Fleischer. Based on Gordon W. Prange's "Tora! Tora! Tora!" and Ladislas Farago's "The Broken Seal", the film accurately depicts the events on both sides of the Pacific leading up to the stunning attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet on Sunday, December 7, 1941.
Even though it covers an 18-month period between Admiral Yamamoto's (Soh Yamamura) initial planning for Operation Hawaii and the attack itself, Tora! Tora! Tora! (the title refers to the code used to inform the Japanese that the Americans had been caught by surprise) never drags or seems dull. I learned, for instance, that Japanese Ambassador Nomura was a skilled and honorable diplomat who did not know what his country's military leaders were planning, and that he hoped to avoid war. I was also stunned by how General Walter C. Short (Jason Robards) was so preoccupied by the threat of sabotage from Hawaii's 125,000 Japanese inhabitants that he foolishly parked all the bombers and fighters in Hickam and Wheeler Fields in neat rows, supposedly to make them easier to guard but actually making them sitting ducks.
What amazed me about watching this movie is how clueless Pearl Harbor's defenders were on that Sunday morning. Though many people think the first shot of the Pacific War was fired by the Japanese, it was actually fired by the USS Ward on a Japanese midget submarine trying to sneak into the harbor. This happened roughly an hour before the first bomb fell on Battleship Row. I would have thought that the report of an unknown submarine being fired upon in a restricted area would have alerted the whole fleet. Wrong! American officers in Oahu were so certain that the Japanese would be spotted long before they could launch a strike that Captain James Earle (Richard Anderson) asks for confirmation before he tells his superiors. This does not make Adm. Husband E. Kimmel (Martin Balsam) very happy and I thought he was very angry that the Ward's initial report did not reach him in time.
The movie makes clear to the audience that history often hinges on small but significant details. Who would have thought that the fate of two great nations would be decided by a diplomat's slow typing speed, or that a report of a large radar blip off to the north of Oahu would be received with the phrase, "Well, don't worry about it."? It sounds like bad fiction but everything in this movie is based on historical fact.
Tora! Tora! Tora! has incredible battle scenes. Most of the aerial scenes were shot using either vintage planes or realistic replicas (because there are no flying Zero fighters, T-28 Texans were modified to look like the famous Japanese planes). The Navy actually allowed 20th Century-Fox to film in and around Pearl Harbor and rented a World War II era carrier that was to be decommissioned to serve as a stand in for the Japanese carrier. Clever editing, good miniature effects and carefully built live action sets give the illusion that one is actually reliving the Day of Infamy.
The 60th Anniversary Special Edition DVD was released around the same time as 2001's Pearl Harbor. It features an all new 20-minute documentary, director's commentary, the orginal theatrical trailer, and restores the movie to its original widescreen format. It has four audio tracks (English 4.1, the commentary, English Dolby Surround, French Mono), and subtitles in English and Spanish.

Excellent movie and extras. Details of the making of the film very interesting. Just by watching the movies you would not think that it takes so much work and funding to produce it.

Tora, Tora, Tora, is a great movie to review the historical context and events leading to the US-Japanese confrontation during WWII. Sober presentation and dialogue, good depiction of the slow and negligent reaction of many in front of mounting evidence are representative of the often clumsy way large organizations adapt to change and events.
The downside of the movie, however, is the poor depiction of ships and war gear which often look like cardboard models devoid of realistic details. Use of real planes save some of it.

After seeing Das Boot for the first time recently, my interest was piqued for another WWII movie. I remember when Tora! was in the theater while I was in high school...and that I had no interest in seeing it at the time. This is a serious-minded, fact-based film of epic proportion. It has similarities to Das Boot in that part of the story is told from the US enemy's point of view. And, oddly enough, I found the structure of the film to be somewhat reminiscent of The Deer Hunter, or even King Solomon's Mines [1950], in that there is a long, detailed build-up of the story prior to any action sequences. And once the action arrived, I sat there thinking, "How did they do this?" Especially considering the fact that this was 1970. But the biggest reward for me is the story itself, and the non-Hollywood way in which it is told here. No one would get financial backing today for a film of this expense coupled with such a non-fiction approach.

I just watched this last week (Mar 2004). It took over an hour for the movie to give you the background before you got close to the battle scene. But the final hour was great, including a scene with a woman flying instructor being dumbfounded as her paltry biplane is taken over by a hundred zeros and bombers.

The fx were great, even by 2004 standards. No fake CG stuff, you know all those planes on the tarmac were really blowing up. In todays movies, you just see a big fireball with some unrecognizable parts flying about. In this film, you saw propellers flying straight off the engine, unattached engines sliding into buildings, cowlings popping straight up, and fiery airplanes with no driver hitting other parked airplanes causing a chain reaction explosion. Plus they managed to capture the real sound when each part hit the pavement. I don't remember too many films that ever did that.

The fx left me saying "Wow! I bet that was hard to set up!"

This movie is historians' dream of the description of pearl harbor. I Recomend you buy this. There is a ton of fun in it.

The film has real Japanese actors directed by a Japanese moderate director. In this regard the Japanese scenes are much authentic than the recent "Pearl Harbor" with Japanese American actors. Akira Kurosawa started shooting his scenes with different actors in Japan but soon resigned. None of his shots were used in the film.

it's not a bad film, but why would amazon list kurosawa as one of the directors when none of the scenes he shot were in the final film?