Save your money for something good and enjoyable

People are voting emotionally.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

This is an involved and engaging love story using Japan's involvement in WW2 as a back drop. It starts and ends with I believe a replicated scene that was based on actual footage that I remember seeing when I studied the history of the Second World War in the Pacific.There was nothing I didn't like about the film. I liked the characters, the plot and the CGI. Nothing overpowered any other part of the film.It is a long film at nearly 2.5 hours but I found it totally engrossing.A week after I saw it I watched it again with my daughter (who knows very little if anything of the Japanese involvement in WW2) and she enjoyed it also. She rated it 8/10I found it to be a refreshingly different portrayal of the other side in that conflict.Last Friday night a group of friends came around for dinner. During the meal I was asked if I had seen any good films lately. So after dinner we watched The Eternal Zero. Harry gave it 7/10, Vicky 8/10. If anyone else rates it then I will update this post.

I have no movies which I shed tears so much with an impression ever. This movie is one of my best movies. I was overwhelmed the large-scale. In the movie, I felt like riding the Zero.The story begins that Kentaro and her sister know the fast they have another grandfather with a blood relationship, Kyuzo Miyabe, who died in the WW2. They visit veterans of Miyabe to know who he was. A screen flash back from the present day to those days during WW2. Miyabe has a tenacious clinging to life. He is considered as a coward because everyone at that time thinks it is an honor that they die for their country. Miyabe always has consideration for his wife, daughter, comrade and following. I think he acts like that at the last scene because of the consideration.This movie must be watched forever, especially for young age. We have to remember the tragedy of the war. Even during the war, I see there is a beautiful love.

Despite being one of the better films hiding among the titles on Netflix, 'The Eternal Zero' doesn't seem to have attracted much attention in the west. Given that it's a film that casts a sympathetic look at Japan's kamikaze pilots though that's not exactly surprising. It's already been subject to a wealth of controversy by critics in Japan and abroad, especially as there's one pivotal scene that compares them (favourably) to modern day suicide bombers. This is a shame because at it's heart, 'The Eternal Zero' is a defiantly anti-war movie and a genuinely moving one. Beginning at a funeral, it focuses on siblings Kentaro and Keiko Oishi and their quest to find out more about the Grandfather they never knew. They soon discover that their relative Kyuzo Miyabe was a fighter pilot that died in a kamikaze attack on an aircraft carrier but throughout the war, he was almost universally hated by his fellow pilots. They meet with several veterans who all accuse Miyabe of cowardice for avoiding combat at any cost and after being shouted at by several angry old men, are understandably keen to throw in the towel. Then they decide to go for one last interview and things start to get more complex.From there, the film unfolds Citizen Kane-style through interviews and flashbacks. It turns out Oishi was in truth a brilliant pilot, but one who also desperately wanted to live and return home to his wife. This made him thoroughly unpopular in a culture which at the time venerated the honourable sacrifice, but it also makes him something of a cypher character. Nobody in their right mind would want to smash themselves into a warship in a burning jet plane after all, so how does someone come to be persuaded to do that? And could it happen to any of us or was it something that only Imperial Japan could convince it's people to do?What follows is a moving story of courage disguised as cowardice and a man who firmly believed in life at all cost rather than pointless deaths. There's a few brilliant scenes where characters juggle certain death against uncertain life, not least where Oishi convinces a fellow pilot not to turn back for a suicide run, only to wind up suffering an even worse fate because of it. On a technical level too the film does a great job in recreating aerial combat through CGI (a practical necessity given the lack of functioning Zeros nowadays). The focus isn't on the combat though and anyone expecting constant dogfights will be disappointed. The Battle of Midway scene for example ends all too soon and often, we see the aftermath of battle rather than the battle itself. It makes up for it though in the human drama and when Oishi finds himself flying escort to his own students and has to watch them squander their lives pointlessly, it's both visually impressive and moving.Anyone who still harbours resentment for the Japanese and their actions during WW2 however will still hate this movie. There's no mention of the atrocities of Nanking or the mistreatment of POWs for example, but then they're not the focus of the film. This is about impressionable young men being brainwashed into throwing their lives away and their ancestors struggling to come to terms with it. In that sense, Kentaro and Keiko are representative of modern Japan itself; they don't have to approve of their own history in order to sympathise with it. This is a great film, but it'll provoke a heated argument or two, a fact which it foreshadows in a night out that goes disastrously wrong.

when a movie is adapted from a novel, there are things when you read the novel, some of the impossible and highly unlikely storyline and dialog written by the author, might not consciously spot by the reader the impossibilities unlikely to be heard or seen by any third party in the novel about some dialog that only delivered between two other persons. yet in this film, or in that novel, when the husband suddenly came back to see his wife and his baby daughter, what he said to his wife before returning to his battle station, such as, "i'll be back, even i died, i'll be back to you and to our daughter..." blah, blah and blah, well, those words are absolutely impossible to be heard by the third person, but this impossible crap just happened in this film, thus made the film suddenly became so ridiculously unbelievable. this film just telling from the side and in the eyes of the Japanese and their survivors from the WWII and somehow was trying to tell their post second world Japanese new generations a subtly twisted around story from their cruelty and their heartless attacks, their barbarous acts, the widely spread animal-like atrocity to America and to most part of the Asian countries like China, Korea and most south east Asian countries. this film also got a hidden agenda for the purpose of self-justifying for what they did to their own people and in the meantime, trying so subtly to gain some sympathy from those countries and their people suffered during the invasions of the Japanese military forces. this is a self-indulgent, self-righteous and self-justified one-sided story, only emphasizing the very little part or even just one Japanese pilot whose goal is to survive the war and return to his family, but never allow the Japanese audience to have the least opportunity to know the other side and the other part of what their Japanese military forces, in the air or on the ground, did to the mankind during that time. the Japanese people have to know one thing: why the American never used atomic bombs on the 3rd Reich motherland but on their island nation. the 'WHY' actually is more important to be told in this self-indulgent tear-jerking Japanese fictitious story. to me, this is a very pretentious and untruthful movie that only tried to win some empathy from their own people and nothing more.it is also clear that the author of this novel has used the plotting technique from the movie 'Rushomon': so many different people tried to explain one happenstance from so many different angles, yet there was no possible way whatsoever to determine which one was actually the ultimate truth.a reader of a novel as well as a viewer of a movie should at least use their brains and their basic logic and/or common senses in order not to be so easily manipulated by the storyline.