Hell in the Pacific: Grueling and brilliantly acted anti-war thriller is just as socially important now as it was in 1968
War is horror. The very idea of it, stripped of its marketing and glory, is the stuff ripped from a nightmare. It’s primal and tribal and evil by design, pitting human beings against each other for murky reasons. The concept that people are programmed to think that other people are “the other,” that other human beings are bad, are “the enemy,” is ludicrous and yet still, nations wage wars for reasons both noble and craven. No matter the motive, men and women are told to kill other men and women by people who hide in safe places. Hopefully, one day, humanity will be civilized enough and evolved enough to find better ways to solve its conflicts that don’t involve offering up others as human shields.
Which brings us to director John (Deliverance, The Emerald Forest) Boorman’s gripping and seemingly-forgotten 1968 thriller and morality play Hell in the Pacific, a brilliantly acted and directed war movie that strips away expected sequences of battle and bloodshed and complications of plot to simply focus on the folly of war, particularly the ways in which war totally and often irreparably dehumanizes those who are in the eye of its storm. It’s as much a horror movie as any survivalist shocker out there and it artfully avoids exploitative elements in favor of real, universally-understood human drama.
In it, two of the biggest stars in their respective countries at the time, Lee Marvin (USA) and Toshiro Mifune (Japan), star as soldiers during the waning days of WW2 who, after some sort of unknown battle, end up stranded together on the shores on an uncharted island in the Pacific. Neither speaks the other’s language and, when they both finally realize that other is not alone, their first impulse is to murder the other. Boorman brilliantly illustrates this in a brief, surreal sequence where they both have a go at doing just that, with Mifune battering Marvin with a stick and Marvin butchering Mifune with a dagger. But they don’t kill each other, instead they circle each other in their new shared habitat, occasionally fighting and capturing and humiliating the other while simply trying to survive. Eventually, however, they both clue into the fact that their interests — eating, sleeping, enduring, even laughing when they can — are shared and an uneasy alliance and even friendship evolves. But are their similar human desires and behaviors enough to erase the invisible wall that their leaders have erected between them?
The horrors of war-forged cultures having empathy for the other was explored rather deftly in the controversial Season 5 The Twilight Zone episode “The Encounter,” with George Takei and Neville Brand trapped in an attic and, despite the fact that the war had been over for two decades, the impulse to kill each other still stands tall. Hell in the Pacific forgoes any supernatural hokum and instead creates a primal, savage world that’s urgent and real. Boorman’s film doesn’t side with either character, nor does it ask us to. That’s the poetry of the movie. Because we are not told who is good or bad, we are forced to align ourselves with the man of our choosing. Audiences in Japan will naturally navigate towards Mifune, while American audiences will side with Marvin. Initially. But by the end of the picture, there is no xenophobia. There is no “other.” There are only two human beings at the mercy of nature.
In a bold move, Boorman insisted that neither actor was to be subtitled for the theatrical release of the movie in any territory, so the two-hander film’s sparse dialogue was incomprehensible to those who could not speak either language. Neither actor understood each other either, so we are forced to watch two men legitimately communicate and act and argue and make mirth using their bodies and vocal inflections. Kino Lorber’s gorgeous new Blu-ray release does give viewers the option of subtitles for Mifune, but we strongly suggest you stick to Boorman’s original aesthetic as it makes the film much purer an experience. The original ending is wildly nihilistic and depressing, but the Blu-ray also offers the alternate ending, which is stark and just as effective, albeit for different reasons.
Hell in the Pacific is a fever dream of a movie that was ahead of its time (there are moments here that you will find in everything from Jaws to Castaway) and because of that, the movie failed at the box office and was largely forgotten. With its jazzy, primitive score by Lao Schifrin that echoes Jerry Goldsmith’s music for that same year’s Planet of the Apes, and a pair of career-best performances by two of the greatest actors of their respective generations, this is a film that is not only a masterful work of grueling cinema but an important allegorical picture whose messages are sadly just as potent today as they were in 1968.
