A war movie of guts, glory and heavy gloss

War movies have a hard time telling the truth about one of humankind's most universal acts. Even when filmmakers loudly proclaim their intention to get it right, they nearly always make their films as Americans or Russians or Japanese, with the accompanying social, political and, needless to say, commercial filters. In "Saving Private Ryan," Steven Spielberg created some of the most gut-wrenching battle footage in the history of film, but he still waved the flag. Tom Hanks' character had the shakes, but he was still an All-American hero, performing mainly for a paying audience of his countrymen.

Be that as it may, there is still a wide gap between the red-white-and-blue, black-and-white approach of Edward Dmytryk's 1945 "Back to Bataan," with John Wayne as an American officer leading brave Filipino freedom fighters against the evil Japanese invaders, and that of Terrence Malick's "Thin Red Line," in which war is stripped of ideology and reduced to its essentials, including its awful beauty.

On that spectrum Yukio Fuji's "Merdeka (Freedom)," which depicts Japanese soldiers fighting for Indonesian independence, is far to the right, deep in John Wayne territory. But the straight-up jingoism present in "Back to Bataan," shot when Americans were still dying in Philippine jungles, is less understandable in a film made at the turn of the new millennium, when Japanese have had half a century to reflect on World War II and presumably distance themselves from wartime propaganda.