Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle
Immersive biopic highlighting one man’s epic devotion to duty.
Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle tracks the life of Hiroo Onoda, a real-life Japanese special forces soldier after World War II, in which he retreats into the Philippine jungle to carry out his instructed mission to never stop fighting. The movie follows his devotion to the cause over 29 years until he is finally convinced to surrender.
As with many true-story movies, the interplay between documentary and dramatic style provides a fertile ground for plot and character intrigue causing one to constantly question what is based on fact and what is embellished. At 167 minutes, shot largely in jungle scenes with few characters, the docu/drama tension is essential in keeping our interest throughout. It’s especially noticeable during the long sequences of torrential rain where the camera sits still capturing no action whatsoever. We slowly are immersed in the same feeling of what must have been a interminably long time for Onoda to survive without human contact or resources against the ravages of nature.
I think it’s largely due to the masterful cinematography that Onoda works so successfully. It quickly establishes a believability to the duration of the story and establishes a perfect counterpoint between nature and Onoda himself— both are unyielding, simple and brutally effective.
The director Arthur Harari sets up a near perfect character arc from early failure to selection for special forces, to the main test of attrition after the conclusion of the war in 1945. Because the early backstory is so stark and formative, the transformation (or lack thereof) of Onoda during the key phases of the movie has us simultaneously rooting for his success and disparaged by his own constant undoing. It highlights the universal stubbornness we all feel and elevates it to mythic proportions.
The many vignettes using associated characters are deftly introduced and mimic storylines from other war movies - Deliverance, Apocalypse now, Platoon etc. touching on themes of loyalty, team survival, insanity, isolation and ultimately deference to authority.
Obviously there is a wealth of interesting material in Onoda, any one theme is big enough to make a good movie, but I keep coming back to the real-life aspects of the story. This is a movie that has you questioning increasingly at every scene: “was this exactly how it happened?” As the movie progresses it becomes easier and easier to believe that it was.
The culmination further reinforces that feeling with a sublimely ordinary reveal which at once breaks the spell of the jungle and yanks us back to our present selves. Harari masterfully lines up the devices to stretch between vintage caricature, historic realism, timeless introspection, and finally breaking the 4th wall.
On par with Kurosawa’s epics, Harari somehow manages to transcend the traditional Japanese style by imbuing it with a kind of Hollywood docu-realism. At many points No Country For Old Men came to mind in its weird mix of atmospheric hyper-reality with fantastical story elements, yet the strong Japanese culture pervading every character and plot decision honours perfectly Onoda.
CONCLUSION
Onoda is not a fast-paced easy-answers movie, but it has enough mainstream cues to successfully suck in even the short-attention-spanned. Like a Hemingway novel, its deceptive simplicity, stark natural environment, and universal human struggles, draws us in and then resonates deeply over an extended period of time.
It’s a movie that serves like a universal companion, like a friend you haven’t seen for 40 years but no time has passed. It is the kind of movie that will be listed in cinema textbooks next to to Husbands, Paris Texas, Mystery Train, etc. as a pivotal film for inspiring and informing the next generation of filmmakers.
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