No big-budget battle picture, this is a small, intimate chamber of moral horrors. Fukasaku spares neither his characters nor his viewers to deliver a personal anti-war film that indicts an entire social system.

People are tested to the breaking point, without meaning or goal except to escape a miserable death. By the end of the story, you are invited to conclude that no one who felt the brunt of the war survived it; that in truth the Japanese nation did not survive. Those who stay more or less intact seem frankly superhuman.

Prominently featured: sham leadership, ethical vacuity, corrupt... read the rest.