The Great Raid (Miramax)

long before i had even seen it, i knew it would be difficult for me not to like this film: given that i'm a filipina (who's always been proud of her roots), that i've always been a fan of cesar montano (still an albert-anian though, nyehe), that i'm (ehem) not such a big fan of the japanese, and finally (and most importantly), that i'm a girl - who, just like any other girl in the world, will find it incredibly hard to resist a man in uniform. hee. and like it, i did, possibly because i simply refused to not like it, and well, because as soon as i saw (start counting) benjamin bratt (1), james franco(2), logan marshall-green(3), joseph fiennes(4), and of course, cesar montano(5! phew) all decked out in their military greens, my giggly and gushy (yes, such a word exists) school-girl-with-a-crush (ala kirsten dunst in spiderman) persona just took over. hee.

good-looking soldiers aside, though, the great raid is just an okay-film: great story, great (not to mention gorgeous) actors... unfortunately, it suffers quite a bit in the execution. although before anything else let me say that as a filipina, i'm more than grateful to the producers and writers of this film for depicting the filipino under a new light. my biggest concern before seeing this movie was whether the film would be just another means for the americans to show-off (God knows we've had more than enough of that savior complex) or not, which thankfully, it wasn't. quite interestingly, it’s somewhat the other way around. The Great Raid is an account of a real rescue operation executed by american soldiers of american POWs held by the Japanese in the Philippines (sorry I wasn’t able to phrase that properly) so actually, if you think about it, aside from the location, we shouldn't have that much to do with it. but the film tells us and everybody else that we did, and gives more than enough credit to us for it - providing historical facts for others to understand the story more clearly, but also showing that behind captains, generals and military tactics were people from 2 different races who actually shared a good camaraderie with each other. we were the heroes and the americans were the ones in need this time around, and the film humbly brings this across. but how exactly this is executed is where i have a problem.


the film starts off almost like a documentary, immediately bombarding the viewer with historical fact after historical fact... which for us, can be pretty exciting, but i'd imagine for others would be, well, just boring. it was simply too long and although yes, we get that it's based on a real story and that the film was just cautious in getting its facts straight, no movie should start that way. after this, the movie focuses on the characters and their stories, and doesn't touch much on the facts anymore. i just think that maybe it would have been better if the film found a way to keep the characters' stories running, bringing about the emotion, while incorporating the facts little by little. like you'd realize the historical data along with the stories of these people, instead of separately jotting historical notes in your head first then watching the characters play out their stories after. with such an execution, we experience the characters as fictional; it's as if we established that they're real when the film begins, but forget about it after.


again, i still liked this movie and would highly recommend it to anyone: if not for the movie itself then at least for the story behind it. it's a feel good movie, at least for us filipinos, as we realize that there's more than enough things for us to be proud of, and more than that, that there are actually people other than us who know it.


*additional info: the film actually isn't doing well in the states, earning only around 4 million dollars in its opening week (the film cost around 80 million to make, i think)... praying it'll do better in the following weeks. but to end on a good note, i read from somewhere that the peformance of cesar montano in the film has been received really well, so much that he's planning to go back to the US later this year to discuss movie offers which he's received, as well as the 3-picture contract that he already has with Miramax. pretty cool, huh? :D

*info & pictures from movies.yahoo.com & mb.com.ph