Philosophy of a Knife (2008) — Triskaidekafiles

PHILOSOPHY OF A KNIFE

WRITER: Andrey Iskanov

DIRECTOR: Andrey Iskanov

STARRING: Tetsuro Sakagami as The Officer #1

Elena Probatova as The Favourite Girl

Yukari Fujimoto as The Female Nurse #1

Manoush as the voice of the Female Nurse

Stephen Tipton as Historical Commentary

Anatoliy Protasov as Himself

QUICK CUT: A look back at some atrocious acts committed during World War 2 at Japan’s Unit 731.

THE MORGUE

General Ishii - Or “Officer #1”, I presume. The head of Unit 731, a brilliant bacteriologist, obsessed with insects. A loyal soldier and scientist, and will do anything to gather more information.

The Nurse - A uh, nurse at the facility. She voices some concerns over what she is doing, and the cost to her soul, but goes along with it anyways.

Anatoliy Protasov - An Russian engineer and doctor and translator born in Harbin, China. He grew up and lived near where Unit 731 was constructed, and is able to give a personal account of events, even from a distance, and also served as one of the people translating documents for the trial of those involved.

It cuts like a knife, but it feels so wrong.

TRISK ANALYSIS: Welcome back, Triskelions, to our first review for October, Philosophy of a Knife! This is the one I was teasing a bit as being a bit special. See, I heard about this Russian movie that was said to be pretty gruesome. So I grabbed it, grumbled a bit figuring there would be subtitles, but it's been awhile.

I get the movie, and see, oh! It's mostly in English, with a few subtitles mixed in as necessary. But oh, it's more of a dramatic recreation documentary? And it is...wait, FOUR HOURS LONG?? I nearly scrapped the idea entirely, especially after watching it. But...I knew the 500th review was coming up, (That's a story in and of itself but for another day...) and if ever there was a time where I could break format a bit, justify doing something this long, well, it would be the 500th review.

And fair warning going into this; this is a movie chronicling the events and experiments that happened in Unit 731 during World War 2. This is some serious subject matter, and I want to acknowledge that. I'm still gonna be making jokes, which might come off as making light of a serious situation, but I will try to keep it more to what the movie is showing and how it's showing it, than the actual events. Consider this gallows humour, whistling past the graveyard, making jokes to try and lighten the mood during the darkness, without mocking the darkness itself, too much.

But that is a very fine line to walk, and I am supposedly only human.

Unit 731 was a Japanese base located in northeastern China, during the Japanese invasion of the mainland during the war. There were plenty of Chinese and Russian citizens who lived in the nearby towns, and the movie paints it as a very 'stay out of our way we'll stay out of yours" situation, that was tenuous at best.

The movie opens with some text explaining all these events really occurred, and with a bare minimum of research, I'm gonna accept this as factual enough The only stuff I might quibble with is some of the personal stuff, but as near as I can confirm, the experiments are indeed real things that were done on real people.

A woman's voice begins to narrate, and she will be a constant presence through the film, as we follow her journey through bits and pieces. She sets the stage of August, 1945, and that she has to leave Unit 731, where she has spent several years as a nurse at the facility. The second world war is coming to an end, the emperor has declared he is not a god, but an ordinary man, and she has to wonder if all the horrors they did, all the sacrifices they made, were in vain.

Then it's on to the next arguably main "character" of the movie, a Russian man who, as a child and younger man, lived near Unit 731 and hints about how he had an encounter with it at some point in his life. This is presented as segments of an interview done with the man in his old age, likely capturing these memories for the public record, and to give more credence to the narrative.

We have another English narrator who describes most of what is going on for the audience, and they all explain how any plane flying over the area was shot down, and the pilots executed, to preserve the secrecy of the place. This is serious business.

Next, we have a lengthy sequence of Japanese soldiers escorting a man, presumably one of those pilots, on a long walk into the Russian winter to dramatise such an execution.

After awhile, they have the man kneel down, he is blindfolded, and instead of being shot like one might expect, he is beheaded right there with a sword.

The English narrator gives a brief overview of the history of the region, and how it's location made it a prime location for China, Japan, Russia, Korea, etc, to all fight over an interest in it. I won't get into it, because it's a lot, and only relevant in setting up the decades of battles over the region.

It then shifts back to the Russian man, Anatoliy Protasov giving his life story of his early schooling in the town of Harbin, which would eventually lead to his higher education. Let it not be said this movie is not thorough in setting the stage.

After detailing the construction of what would become Unit 731, and the murder of the labor used to construct it, he tells of his higher education, going from engineering to medical school. I am sure this education in medical sciences will be what leads him into telling us what his connection is with Unit 731!

The English narrator takes back over with more history, but does finally move on to Russia developing biological weapons, and eugenics programs, so at least we're getting close to the point.

We are introduced to General Ishii, a military man and bacteriologist, who witness western forces beginning work in germ warfare, and warned that Japan must start the same or be left behind. He would become the head of Unit 731.

After describing the basic layout of the facility, and how people were constantly going missing, the nurse takes over, describing the prisoners, people captured and taken in, many around the age of 20, in the prime of their lives, in particular three women and a child, whom we'll come back to time and again, to try and focus the horrors on a few faces.

The English narrator then gets into some of the experiments being done, and the creation of germs and anthrax, and other biological weapons in the process.

I've done it! I've cracked the formula for New Coke!

While the nurse, I presume, plays a mouth harp, we watch as bodies are smashed up, hacked up, and disposed of. She narrates about how effective biological warfare is, it isn't destructive to infrastructure, and can be spread by placing the payload on clothes, in food, on everyday objects etc.

The narrator shares how they developed the method of spreading plague through fleas, and Anatoliy explains how the fleas were harvested off plague rats with bright light to make them run for a lone dark hole.

We watch the nurse befriend a pregnant prisoner, while she is telling us some of the horrors that were visited upon pregnant women; the baby would be surgically removed, which usually proved fatal, and if it didn't, the woman would then be returned to the pool of potential test subjects, fated to die one way or another.

And this is the first real horrific moment of the movie, as we watch that woman's baby being removed. And I remind you, THIS part is a reenactment, as opposed to all the stock footage used thus far for much of the movie.

This is not how you do the psychic surgery trick.

But this is only the tip of the iceberg, as we now move on to the radiological experiments of Unit 731, starting with testing x-ray exposure for hours and how that affects the human liver.

Instead of showing us much of the radiation experiments, we then jump to the other female prisoners, who just sit there and stare at the Japanese soldiers, and this goes on for awhile. The pacing of this movie is a mess.

Before we get any closer, we jump back to Anatoliy, making a very good point about how the soldiers he saw captured, and during the subsequent trials, didn't look like monsters. This is always something to remember; these were humans, people, and in their way, they thought they were doing what was necessary for god, emperor, and country. The strongest point this movie makes is about the horrors we can convince ourselves as being justified under the right circumstances.

Then we get some musings on pain from the nurse, about how if we learn how much pain the human mind can handle, and how to control it, could be advantageous to the war. Cue a long sequence of watching every single one of a woman's teeth being brutally and graphically removed.

Around this point is when I'm starting to think watching this is an endurance challenge in pain for the viewer, but I don't want to belittle TOO much the genuine horrors being depicted here. I'm not sure if this is uncomfortable because of he subject matter, or the five plus minutes of screaming, crunching, and tearing sounds that sound a bit more campy than they should be.

Which isn't to say "they should do this without screams!" it's just that the sound feels off, and a bit silly, considering the subject matter.

That is followed up with a lot of photographs of people, and I presume they were real victims of these experiments, because you want to put a face to the suffering as much as possible.

So the next batch of experiments we are let in on revolve around sexually transmitted diseases, and prisoners being forced at gunpoint to rape women to pass them on, and that's about all I'm gonna say on that subject.

And once you were done being used up for one experiment, and no longer useful? Well, there's more experiments for you to endure! As the prisoner we saw being forced upon the woman, is then taken to a gas chamber to see how he fares in that, and to gather information.

While the nurse is busy skinning one of the victims, we go back to the soldier and female prisoner staring longingly at each other. I THINK he's supposed to be General Ishii, and he's becoming enamored of the woman.

I don't know how true this relationship was to actual events, but I just keep thinking about "Titanic" tacking on the romance plot to a real tragedy.

Dear diary, one of the soldiers looked at me again today...

Let me try and say this as delicately as possible: the effects on breaking down the human body, both earlier in the radiation experiments watching high speed imagery of stuff melting away, and the actual physical peeling apart of a body we see the nurse doing at this point in time, is some really well done stuff. For what it is.

There is more experiments done on a woman to see how long people can survive from common battlefield wounds, collecting more data in a cold, detached way.

After a whole lot of stock footage, which at the very least, I can say is a bit of a welcome breather is not entirely unwelcome, it's back to Anatoliy.

He tells a story about how one day he went out into the woods to pick mushrooms, and encountered a Japanese soldier wanting to know what they were doing there. They showed the mushrooms, the soldier told them to leave and never let them be seen there again.

And that, that my dear readers, is Anatoliy's personal connection to the Unit 731 facility. He ran into a soldier somewhere in the woods and was told to shoo. That's it.

Then the torment continues, as the Japanese soldiers experiment with white phosphorus to catalogue it's effects on human skin, how long, etc.

Following that up is feeding insects into a woman's vagina, just to see what that does. Ishii was fascinated by insects and their possible uses, and uh, this was something he tried, I guess?

Then we watch the nurse write a letter home to mom, of the sort of, "It's tough here, but we're keeping it together, we have regular movie nights, and other very normal things!" in a stark contrast to what we've seen.

I would wager this was a real, or inspired by real, letters written by people at the facility, completely breezing past the horrors they were doing.

Part two begins with, gasp surprise! more experiments being performed. What are we up to now? Oh wait, I think this is just observing the scarred results of their white phosphorus experiments.

The subject eventually has enough, and attacks the doctors, and all things considered, doesn't do a bad job of trying to fight back. At least, until the people in good health grab some weapons and beat him down easily.

We then watch the woman Ishii has shown interest go in for a procedure, and I THINK it's an abortion, but we keep seeing flashes of centipedes, so I don't know exactly what's going on. Either way, this is the sort of horror show that conservatives love to invent to scare people with as how your average every day abortion goes.

The Japanese army begins it's invasion of the distant ice planet, Hoth.

Next, we get into the Japanese wanting to find some way to combat the hellish cold of Russian winters, to gain an advantage. Which leads to more, yep, experiments! They had a special room to create extreme low temperatures and wind, and before that, they just did shit outside.

One prisoner is stripped naked, trudged through the snow, tied to a pole, and has water poured over him, to see how long he lasts and how much he suffers, and how the body and skin change as the damage worsens.

Next, they would warm the subject back up gradually with extremities in warm water, to gauge how long and how hot things take, for better data.

Meanwhile, the other female prisoner has her face peeled off like she's a ripe orange. An insect crawls out of her, and they save that for later. There are moments like this, and the possible abortion, that I wish there was more clarity on, because some weird stuff happens that is NOT explained. The movie can spend 20 minutes talking about the history of conflict near Harbin, but not ten seconds on where the insect came from?

Then the nurse puts her face back in place to take a photograph for their records. Unfortunately, the face refuses to stay put, and keeps falling off. OH YOU POOR BABY you can't document your war crimes.

With those experiments out of the way, it's on to bomb explosions. They would fill up bombs with shrapnel, tie prisoners up around the explosive, and set it off, so they could observe the wounds. You get the idea by now, I'm sure.

Then there's the plague experiments, and the description and depiction of the various symptoms, complete with discharges from any orifice they can show.

But if plague isn't your thing, how about some experiments in electricity?

Anatoliy interjects at this point, talking about how everything was done with the scientific method, and how methodical Ishii was, positing that because they had all this data of experiments run on humans, and not animals, is why Japan leapt so far ahead in medicine.

But if you still haven’t found anything to your liking, how about experiments on humans in a vacuum pressure chamber? Sure, why not at this point?? This was done to simulate how people are affected at high altitudes, or deep sea depths. If something goes wrong, how is the body affected, and what can be done about it.

Anatoliy comes in again to talk about the working hours, and that they were normal, officially. But Ishii was a night owl, so often made people stay late into the night. So...he was just a dick to EVERYone, huh? Seriously, after everything else we've heard, "He made people work really late into the night" is kinda not even registering.

FINALLY the war comes to an end, and with it, Allied troops getting closer and closer to Unit 731. But never mind that, we have to go in depth on how the entire nation of Japan is dealing with the invasion and defeat. And yes, again, historical context is important, but this still feels ancillary to the core story.

Taking five, ten minutes to go into the nuclear bombs that were dropped, complete with stock footage, and reenactment depictions of people burning, doesn't add anything to the story, and instead feels lurid. This could have been "The US then dropped two nuclear weapons etc" but no, it's "One bomb was dropped. Let's spend several minutes watching that. And also, another bomb was dropped, so let's spend more time watching that...wait, what was Unit 731 again?" If there's a point to any of it, I guess it's "See, Americans are monsters too" and I guess that's fair in it's way.

But we do get back to Unit 731, because with the war ending, Allied forces were approaching, and the cleanup began. Papers were burned, anything valuable was taken, and prisoners were disposed of with gas. So, horrific til the very end.

Meanwhile, Ishii takes the prisoner he had been staring longingly at, and takes her outside. The movie starts to play this off as an almost hopeful moment, someone going free, or that Ishii has a heart...but instead it's all ripped away when he shoots her in the back and then the head, to continue covering his tracks.

As for the nurse, she complies with the general's orders to commit suicide in case they were captured.

From this point, most of the movie just covers the trails afterwards, which is when much of this information came to light, and the people in charge were held responsible. This is the part when Anatoliy really enters the narrative, because he was brought in as a translator, to speak with people, as well as go over documents.

We end with how the trial went with there not being much in the way of consequences, commentary on how badly Americans treated prisoners compared to the Russians, and finally a memorial for those who died, and a hope we can do better.

TRISK ASSESSMENT

Video: It’s fine, but it’s a lot of stock footage and old photos, that don’t have a high level of clarity. It’s also filmed very grindhouse style, with a lot of quick cuts, and many moments when you can’t see what’s going on. Which some may argue is a plus.

Audio: It’s good, it’s mostly a dialogue driven movie, so it’s all fine. The screams and schloppy noises are a bit much, but that’s a style choice, I guess.

Sound Bite: “I don’t know if I can watch this,” said by the nurse as they begin the dental surgery, if I remember correctly. You get back here right now, if I’m watching this so are you!

Body Count: Yeah, no, not keeping track of this, this time. Feels a bit too ghoulish, considering.

Blood Type - A: Like I said, for something on a low budget grindhousey style, it’s really well done. The skinning is done, he cleaning of the skull, all the medical procedures…it’s all gruesome and bloody and can be unsettling.

Sex Appeal: Is there nudity? Yes. But there is nothing sexy here.

Drink Up! Every time a new experiment is introduced. You’re gonna need it.

Movie Review: This is a tough one to really review, and this section is going to be longer than normal. Plus, I’m dumping the “Entertainment Value” section for this, because this isn’t about entertainment, and I don’t want to glorify these events any worse than I have already.

I do genuinely think this is an important story, or important information to get out there. More people should no about the atrocities humans have committed, as a cautionary tale, if nothing else. But it’s just as important to realise these people in many cases are humans, just like you and me, and to simplify them as being simply “monsters” is to take away some awareness of what we can be capable of. I’m just not sure if THIS is the best way to have told this story.

I give a blow by blow of most everything being done, but even I, for sake of brevity, skim past a few things. There are scenes were people are just hacking and mutilating victims, with no real narrative connection to anything, just filling time with imagery.

It's difficult to say things like "the melting face of radiation victims conducted as horrific experiments look cool". But I don’t deny some genuine solid work was put into how everything was done. And it is just as hard to say "this is too slow I want to get to murdering innocent people".

The pacing is such a big ‘problem’ with this movie. It did NOT need to be four hours long. The whole first thirty minutes doesn't serve much purpose. Some groundwork and history is important, but this is just too much. As well as Anatoliy's connection to the base. That's at least not so bad because he IS important to the aftermath, the prosecution, and that stuff, and having that additional personal touch is nice. It is also nice to have him be a recurring voice that was THERE, just to break things up, and as a thread throughout the movie, instead of just showing up as an interview at the end. But teasing out his connection so much to JUST be the mushroom gathering trip? And then there’s the LAST 30-40 minutes, which could have been summed up with a text card "those in charge of Unit 731 were put on trial for their crimes/escaped/went to the US,” as necessary. The movie should’ve ended with Ishii’s murder of the woman, with a pinch of wrap up to the war, just to tie everything up.

Overall, it’s a well made, if bloated documentary, that feels a bit too lurid in the subject matter, spending too much time showing what was done, for too little story. And I get on one hand it is being shown SO much to really confront you and shove it in your face with it, but at some point you gotta go “we get it” and move on.

I can’t say “go watch this if you’re a gore hound!” because that feels disgusting, and it’s too lurid for someone looking for a documentary or information, but if you keep your hand on the fast forward button to get through some of the less important bits, and the more graphic bits, I do feel there’s something here worth seeing, even if this movie is, in almost every regard, a bit too much.