Powerful

i must have seen a different film!!

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

No it isn't, it's west of Java. Plenty of films have contained goofs, but there cannot be many which have contained a goof in their very title. Apparently the film makers felt that, for some reason, it made a more exotic title than "Krakatoa, West of Java".Disaster films ("Airport", "Earthquake", "The Poseidon Adventure", etc.) have become synonymous with the seventies, but "Krakatoa, East of Java" is an example from the preceding decade. Like "Titanic" and the recent "Pompeii" the film combines a real historical disaster with a fictional "human interest" story. Indeed, it is this back-story which takes up most of the film's running-length; there are a few earlier rumblings but the big fireworks show does not really get going until the second half.The story is based upon an attempt to recover a valuable cargo of pearls from a shipwreck close the island of Krakatoa. When the expedition sets off they are not particularly worried by this location as they believe that the volcano on the island has been dormant for around two hundred years. As, however, the film is set in August 1883, they are in for a rude awakening. Among the characters are the ship's Dutch captain, his beautiful mistress who is fleeing from an abusive husband and looking for her young son, from whom she has been separated, an laudanum- addicted diver with health problems and his girlfriend, the British inventor of a diving bell, an Italian father-and-son team of balloonists and four female Japanese pearl fishers, hired for their diving expertise. One of these girls becomes romantically involved with the younger Italian. With so many different strands, the plot is an unwieldy one and the script does not always read fluently. Some developments are dealt with far too quickly, especially the episode in which a gang of convicts briefly seize control of the ship before Maximilian Schell's valiant captain sees them off by the simple expedient of watering them down with a fire hose whereupon they all jump overboard, never to be heard of again. They were presumably all drowned or eaten by sharks, fates which they considered preferable to the awful prospect of having to face Schell's fire hose. (This is one strand which easily could have, and probably should have, been omitted from the script). There are no outstanding acting performances, Brian Keith's ageing, drug-ravaged diver Harry Connerly probably being the best.Like "Titanic" and "Pompeii", however, this is not the sort of film you watch for the sake of great writing or of great acting. It is the sort of film you watch for one reason, and one alone- the big bang at the end. And the special effects of the volcanic eruption and subsequent tsunami are indeed pretty good by sixties standards and still hold up well even today. (One of the Japanese girls actually uses the word "tsunami", rarely used in English back in 1969; everyone else in the film says "tidal wave"). The film actually won an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. I hope the film-makers appreciated it- it was never going to win one for anything else. Especially not for geographical accuracy. 6/10

Krakatoa: East of Java tells of a boatload of assorted people swanning about in the vicinity of Krakatoa in the period immediately before and during the biggest volcanic eruption in recorded human history.This is the sort of spectacular special effects epic we used to get in the days before film effects were advanced enough to be truly spectacular. Oh, how we loved them in those days. Nowadays, we see a well-built model boat (telltale giveaway being the absence of anyone on deck), less effective model sets, some poor matte lines, big water out of scale with the models, some fun pyrotechnics on a model island on a water tank skyline, far too many obviously repeated shots, and some stock footage of tidal waves.All of this takes place as a backdrop to the tedious goings on between a not-very-interesting group of people, so that you don't really care who survives and who doesn't (in fact there are those who you want the volcano to polish off even though you're not supposed to).I bet this was better back in 1969, when big water was still acceptable.

As his debut motion picture, director Bernard Kowalski has done a great job by filming and editing this movie. This movie still holds water and attracts audience to a spell binding show of volcanic eruption, terrific tsunami and the human gall and fighting spirit in the face of death and disaster. Taking into consideration, the time when it was filmed i.e. in late sixties, when filming techniques were not as refined and advanced as now and the special effects department lacked the present cutting edge computer graphic technology, it is, by far a great effort and thrilling experience that re-creates and re livens the colossal natural calamity of the late nineteenth century.

I first saw this movie at the cinema when I was a kid, and it blew me away, if you'll excuse the expression. Probably also started my lifelong interest in Tidal Waves, as I think it was the first time I'd ever heard of them. Watching it 35 years later was not, unfortunately, a particularly rewarding experience.For a start, purely by coincidence, a couple of days before my online rental copy arrived in the mail, a local station played a documentary about the disaster, which despite being a slapped together TV production, made the documentary aspect of the film look outright pathetic. 'Krakatoa' won the special effects Oscar for 1969, and it's quite amazing how old and limited those effects actually seem, compared even with movies of a few years later, like 'The Poseidon Adventure'.Probably what disappointed me most about 'East of Java' is that I had remembered it as focusing much more on the volcanic eruption than it actually does. The film is far more concerned with the adventure yarn about diving for pearls, and the romance between the two main characters. Krakatoa almost seems like just a backdrop sometimes. People rarely even refer to the fact that there's a mountain in the process of blowing itself into the stratosphere, a few hundred yards away. Maximilian Schell as the unflappable captain is particularly infuriating in this regard, as nothing the volcano throws up seems to phase him in the slightest. He barely seems interested in it, as if mountains explode during diving expeditions on a fairly regular basis.The rest of the cast are all adequate, but nobody excels. There is a rather distasteful sequence where an admittedly laudanum-sozzled Brian Keith assaults a Japanese diving girl, and after he dries out by being suspended in a crate for a few hours, nobody seems to think it was a particularly noteworthy incident.It's a decent adventure yarn, but there is little effort made to summon the sense of foreboding and dread which would have been appropriate given what was about to happen. I suppose the art of building tension in disaster movies wasn't really honed until the early to mid 70's.