>>37930Well that's just it. The ultimate message ("Dying for your country sucks, live for the people you care about") I think is a positive one and it's a credit to the movie, the problem is that I think the specific way it focuses on Japan's suffering from war kind of implicitly cedes ground to the nationalist victim narrative given how it sort of glosses over how certain characters in the movie were in all likelihood in the vicinity of certain fucked-up shit the imperial military did to other countries - and I get why, it's a two-hour movie with a lot of legwork to do re: setting up the characters and premise
It does a hell of a lot better than what you'd expect from a Japanese franchise movie on the topic of Japan's involvement in the war, but there's just certain blind spots that unfortunately come with the territory of being a mass-marketed movie that A. is primarily focused on the domestic side of the war and B. has to play to broad audience that isn't going to want to hear about the rape of nanking or comfort women.
Basically, I feel about its politics the way I feel about the politics of Oppenheimer - it's stuck doing a balancing act of recognizing the depravity of its countries' institutions, and still having to make people either complicit or in the vicinity of atrocities that country committed sympathetic