The 1985 Russian film Come and See (well, technically it's Soviet, and in fact is set in Belarus) has recently achieved a level of notoriety online as the most brutal depiction of the horrors of war, but, relative to its era, I cannot imagine any feature surpassing this one. Perhaps it's overlooked because, in Come and See, the Nazis are pure evil, and people like a "bully/victim" story, but in this one the Americans hardly feature, and when they do, they aren't even represented as particularly bad, and instead we just witness "our" side sink into depravity and turn on each other in a way that is irredeemable. There's no nobility of any kind, everything is just shit. One might argue that this isn't really a war movie at all: there are a couple of scenes of American attacks, but they're just scenes of slaughter - there's no suggestion that fighting back is effective or even possible. It's more of a post-apocalyptic vision of hell: it's 1945 and the war is lost for the Japanese and they're in disarray, with just those at the top (perhaps) denying it.
The film opens with our "protagonist," Tamura (played by Eiji Funakoshi, who looks vaguely Indian),
a tubercular soldier being berated by his CO because he has returned from the hospital the CO sent him to because he's too weak to be anything but a burden to his unit. However, the hospital sent him away because it was too full of the critically wounded to bother with those like him who can still walk. The CO is particularly annoyed at the food that he gave Tamura having been used for no purpose. This would have been a few pathetic-looking yams, apparently the only food still available anywhere on the island (which we find out later is the Philippine island of Leyte)), that are in critically short supply. So Tamura is sent back again, this time with a hand grenade and the instruction to kill himself with it if the hospital won't take him (perhaps with the idea that this will save him a lingering death). So, off he goes. His first adventure is coming across a suspiciously smiley native who invites him into his hut and offers him food. We don't understand why, but Tamura is suspicious. He doesn't want to eat the food and instead focuses on food (including yams) that the man seems to have set aside. The man says that that's for his family, but he will go and get Tamura some yams of his own. After he leaves, Tamura smells the cooking food and pronounces it foul. He then gets suspicious and runs after the man, who by now is far in the distance. It wasn't clear to me what Tamura's suspicions were, but the theme of natives killing Japanese soldiers repeats throughout the movie, so presumably this man was part of the resistance, and perhaps the food was poisoned. At any rate, Tamura legs it, and is soon relieved to have reached the hospital. However, now we see the head of the hospital ranting at him, telling him that his CO is a fool for sending him back, and there's no way they can take him. So he totters off to the shade of the edge of the woods surrounding the hospital (it's hard to tell from the high contrast black-and-white, but apparently it's just roastingly hot throughout the film) where there are several in the same boat as him. They bicker over sharing food, and when Tamura gives one of them a couple of yams he promises to steal some from the hospital that night. Tamura advises against it, and indeed we see the man getting caught in the act and he's about to get a severe punishment when an American bombardment begins that ends up destroying the hospital. The edge-of-woods people flee, Tamura on his own, although we meet a couple of the people again later. Tamura sees smoke in the distance
and, on returning to his platoon, discovers that it has been destroyed and there are corpses strewn everywhere. Now he has lost both ends of his recent back-and-forth travels and the rest of the film is a kind of aimless drift from one horror to the next.
He sees a church spire in the distance, indicating a village. Despite the danger he goes there, only to find it deserted (a dog attacks him and he accidentally bayonets it - and that's just a throwaway incident in this movie). Then he discovers a huge pile of corpses of Japanese soldiers - clearly killed by the villagers. Terrified, he spots a young couple arriving by boat on the nearby beach and watches as they go inside one of the houses. He peeks through the window and sees them ripping up the floorboards to retrieve some treasure. They are clearly no threat, so he goes in. The young woman sees him and won't stop screaming. He begins by desperately trying to reassure her that he's harmless, but as she continues to scream, he ends up shooting her - it's not entirely clear if it's by accident. (And now I think about it, that might be intentional. There is no clear distinction in a lot of cases between things our hero does and things that merely happen to him, adding to the impression that he is just a cork tossing in the toilet of fate.) The young man runs and he tries to shoot him (it's clearly intentional now - he's worried that the man will bring others like those who killed the soldiers) but he gets away. Tamura looks under the floorboards and is delighted to find... salt. This is not just a delicacy, but the stuff of life. He fills his pack with it and is off.
Next he runs into the remnants of another platoon, who have found a yam field. They are scornful of him (because of his tubercular appearance - and indeed, most of the actors in this film look emaciated - the director had his actors starve themselves during the filming, to the extent that the lead actor fainted at one point) until they discover his cache of salt and are willing to take him along to an assumed evacuation point (Palompon). On the way there, they meet up with assorted other dregs of platoons, all in various states of disarray. (There is a humorous scene (of which Paul Schrader is not a fan) where one soldier comes across a pair of abandoned boots.
Delighted, he takes of his own tattered boots and stamps off in the ones he's found. Then the next soldier finds his boots, and does the same, leaving his even-more-tattered boots. Until finally Tamura shows up, finds boots that don't even have a sole and just decides to go barefoot.
Or, another scene (I'm not sure if it's at this point in the film or later) is of him looking at a corpse face down in a puddle and asks "will we all end up like that?" At which, the corpse raises his head and says "what?" and then returns his face to the puddle.)
The soldiers come to a road that the Americans use regularly. They watch a chaplain drive by in a Jeep and are strongly contemplating surrendering to him when the captain of the small platoon that Tamura met in the yam field holds them at gunpoint and forbids them. One of his men has warned Tamura about this captain, saying he'll steal what's left of the salt and abandon him, but does concede that he's cool under fire. The decision is made to cross the road (which blocks the route to Palompon) en masse at night. So this comes to past - seemingly hundreds of soldiers swarming across the road - only for them to come face to face with suddenly appearing headlights, and a row of American tanks mows them down. Tamura escapes and the next day witnesses the full extent of the loss - dozens and dozens of corpses. He also sees an American ambulance pull up and search through the corpses for any surviving wounded. (He fashions a white flag and is prepared to surrender again, to a Jeep that breaks down temporarily on the road, when another Japanese soldier beats him to it, and gets gunned down by a filipina officer who was also in the Jeep, before the US soldiers could restrain her. Tamura quietly abandons his flag and moves on.)
Time passes.
He meets a nearly-dead soldier propped up against a tree who seems to have lost his mind and talks of being picked up soon by an autogyro. He looks on, appalled, as the man reaches down and scoops up something and gobbles it up. At this point, one is glad that this is a black and white film - I wasn't sure if it was his own entrails, but apparently it was his own shit. Tamura retreats in horror - "Come back!" says the soldier, "I'll be dead soon and you can eat me!"
Tamura then meets up (again) with a pair from his old unit - Yasuda, an older, officer-type, the brains, who has an injured leg and (claims that he) cannot move, and Nagamatsu, a skeletally thin but otherwise healthy younger subordinate, who has stuck with Yasuda mainly because he has a stash of tobacco leaves that he keeps strapped to his belly that they can exchange for food. Yasuda is not happy when Nagamatsu brings back Tamura, but yet doesn't like it when Nagamatsu takes Tamura off to sleep a good distance away from Yasuda's dwelling, under the pretense that Yasuda would keep him awake with his nightly moaning caused by his leg-pain, but really because he knows Tamura still has his hand grenade and is worried about what Yasuda will do with it. Nagamatsu has a rifle and has been using it to "hunt monkeys" - he offers Tamura a scrap, but when he tries to chew it, his teeth fall out.
Despite Nagamatsu's warnings, Yasuda gets his hands on Tamura's grenade. Tamura runs off to follow Nagamatsu in his "monkey hunt" and witnesses him trying to kill another soldier. Realizing all of a sudden what "monkey meat" really is, Tamura tries to escape, is almost shot by Nagamatsu, but saves himself by pretending still to have his grenade. Nagamatsu reconciles with Tamura, blames Yasuda for their cannibalism, reassures Tamura that he was never going to eat him because of his TB, and hatches a plan to kill off Yasuda to escape his clutches. He tricks Yasuda into using the grenade, then, along with Tamura, stakes out the only source of water nearby.
As he suspected, Yasuda can actually walk and shows up, and Nagamatsu shoots him. He then descends and proceeds to butcher him in front of the aghast Tamura, who retrieves Nagamatsu's gun and as Nagamatsu turns, with big chunks of Yasuda hanging out of his mouth, shoots him.
Then he sees another of the "fires on the plain" that he initially thought were signals by the Filipino resistance, then was told was just crop burning. He knows he will likely be killed, but expresses in a voiceover that he just wants to see normal life again. Hands raised, he walks towards the smoke... and gets gunned down. The end.
Pretty bleak, huh? Apparently the book it's based on had him survive and narrate events from a Japanese hospital, where he has converted to Christianity, but Kon Ichikawa was having none of it. No redemption for anyone, no "amens". And quite right, too.
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