Hey, Is Tora! Tora! Tora! a Good Movie? Beats Me

Tora! Tora! Tora! is a pain in the ass to type. I’m not one of those eleventy!1111!1!11!1 guys from the internet from ten years ago. I like to think I’m a competent male writer, so exclamation points are rarer than honest congressmen in my text. I have to go looking for the exclamation point, and hunting for it three times in a row makes me peevish. It also makes me peevish to be unable to tell you if, you know, the movie is any good. If I was getting paid, I could write either side of the equation for you. But I’m doing this for free, so all I can rely on is my opinion. I’m not sure I have one.

Let’s go to the trailer, shall we, while I try to make up my mind one more time:

Of course trailers like these were designed to get you to drag your carcass to the theater or drive-in the next time you had five bucks burning a hole in your pocket. You couldn’t tell if a movie from the 1970s was going to be good by relying on the trailer. You had to go see it to figure it out. The TV, VCR, and the internet took all the mystery out of movies. You could just flip the channel or pop in another tape or whatever, or fold your laundry while Freebie and the Bean plays unwatched in the background.

Well, I saw, you know, this movie in the theater when I was a little kid. It used to be on TV a lot. You could rent it ten ways from Sunday after a while. Hell, at this point, you can watch the whole thing, or download it, straight from the Internet Archive.

I watch this movie every once in a while. I have no idea why. I think it’s sorta like the reason people eat Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. It’s no good, but they like it anyway. I have a hunch that the movie isn’t any good, but I wouldn’t swear to it. I wouldn’t swear at it, either, so maybe it’s not that bad. The movie didn’t make any money back in the day, and the critics weren’t kind to it. But here we are, talking about it, and maybe watching it once a year. I’m really not sure why.

The internet will tell you that Richard Fleischer and Akira Kurosawa directed this movie. Akira was hired to do it, but he bugged out before it started. But the internet loves Kurosawa for more or less the same reason it likes Mac and Cheese, so he gets mentioned when the movie gets mentioned at all. At any rate, Fleischer, and some guys with unpronounceable names made of little pictures made the thing back in 1970. Richard Fleischer’s whole career was Mac and Cheese, now that I think of it. He directed plenty of profitable pictures, but you mostly watch them ironically, or not at all. Stuff like Fantastic Voyage or The Vikings. Why do I watch them, too? I don’t know, but I do.

When you get right down to it, Tora… you know, the movie is dry as dust. In a way, it’s duller than a documentary would be. The events plod along and you get the impression that someone had a clipboard with a long list of things that had to be included, and checked them off one by one. It has an enormous cast of That Guys on the American side, and a bunch of Some Japanese Guys playing the villains.

Except they aren’t, really. Its funny, but the Japanese characters are portrayed as either fairly noble or completely clueless. If it wasn’t for Tojo, you wouldn’t find anyone to dislike enough to call a villain. And the Americans are so clueless in their own right, finding heroes is harder than you’d think. But then again, the American soldier’s vibe in World War II was mostly just farmboys and guys from Brooklyn who shrug and spit on their hands and get on with it. Americans are not a traditionally warlike people, I don’t think. We don’t have a bushido class that I’ve seen, anyway, or a Prussian officer class. Even the uniforms are drab.

Maybe the most interesting part of the movie was all the model ships they constructed to film it. Those were great. I’m sure it’s evident without me even mentioning it, but I sniffed a lot of model airplane glue as a kid. It was a big thing back in the 60s and 70s, and we built plastic battleships in between P-51 Mustangs and funny cars. Check out these from the movie:

That’s from the Model Ships in the Cinema website. It’s one of those wonderful websites that used to be common on the intertunnel but is very rare these days. People used to post things on the internet simply for the love of it. The movie spent a lot of time, money, and effort into building an American and a Japanese fleet. And these things aren’t tiny things floating in a glorified bathtub. Some were forty feet long, and were powered by golf cart motors. They were big enough to climb on:

So, you can watch Tor… you know, the movie. I have, and will again. If you can determine if it’s any good at all, I wish you wouldn’t tell me. I’m not sure if I’d like it less if you told me it was terrific, or it stunk, but either way, I’d rather just enjoy it in peace. If enjoyment is the correct word. Beats me.