Simply Perfect

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

The small portions of this movie that have any merit, mostly the archival footage which is in some cases quite well applied, are over shadowed by a number of glaring flaws. The narrator blatantly overlooks other widespread abuses and atrocities committed by the whole of the Japanese military, instead claiming that any injustices were simply in response to pressures from the conflict with Russia. To try and whitewash Unit 731's role as a defencive measure is historically inaccurate, and since the Philosophy of a Knife claims to be a sober look at historical events, it fails on that level. I would say while there are few other movies that focus primarily on Imperial Japan's forays into chemical and biological warfare, this one does not ear points for filling a niche void.

A four hour pseudo documentary about the atrocities carried out at Japanese chemical and bacterial research facility Unit 731, based in China during World War II. Desperately uneven, it veers erratically from an interesting and informative documentary to a black and white art-house movie and then to a (still black and white) extreme gorefest. The recreations of the experiments carried out by Unit 731 are brutal and horrific but it's ultimately the real stock footage that has the most impact. You can recreate death as many times and as accurately as you like but it fades into insignificance when compared with reality.A major problem with the film is the acting of the victims. None of them struggle, scream, cry or show any emotion whatsoever as they are strapped onto operating tables and chairs, led out naked into the freezing snow or hooked up with electrodes and wires. In fact, the expression on one female victim, as her unborn baby is ripped piece by piece from her (all in the utmost graphic detail) seems to suggest that she's actually enjoying the experience. This happens a few times throughout the torture scenes and it completely undermines them.Another problem is the amount of time that you stay with each victim/experiment. There is far more shock value in watching somebody having three or four teeth removed without anaesthetic than twenty of them. This kind of real life horror is far more effective when described with words and occasional flashes of gore, rather than lingering on every drop of blood spilt in extreme close up. It's a gruelling experience and maybe that's what the director wanted - to have you sit through every uncomfortable, nauseating moment. But the problem there is every second you watch it is another second you realise it's just make-up effects and it lessens the very impact it's trying to make. Yet one thirty second sequence of real bodies piled up in a laboratory has a hundred times the desired effect.It also doesn't help that most of the victims portrayed are westerners. Although hundreds of westerners were killed for sure within the facility, the vast majority of Maruta (another word for prisoners, which translates as "logs") were Chinese. One can only assume the reason for this was a combination of the Japanese pretending the occupation of China and the human experiments carried out in Harbin never actually happened, and the Chinese not wanting any part in such an exploitative film, no matter how well it wrapped itself up in it's documentary style, humanitarian message. Therefore most of the actors are Russian, and again, more impact is taken away.As I've previously mentioned, every torture scene would have been more effective with less gore. However, of the experiments on display, the most noteworthy were the frostbite experiment (a man walked out naked into the snow, tied to a post and doused with boiling hot and then freezing cold water), the decompression chamber, radiation torture (watching someone's face slowly burn), phosphorous being placed on a man's face and ignited, burning, exploding and re-igniting constantly, the aforementioned foetus extraction (it may be badly acted but it's still brutal as hell) and plague infection (watching someone bleeding their liquefied internal organs from their rectum is never pretty). Also, the scene where an infected cockroach is forced inside a woman's (actual) vagina in close-up is highly uncomfortable viewing.At absolutely no point can this film ever be called entertaining, although bizarrely, there is one scene near the end which is almost beautiful in it's execution. It still ends in an explosion of blood and brains but in a totally different way than anything before it. It's actually quite moving in it's own violent way.This film, in my opinion anyway, should only be viewed how I went about it - as an educational aid on the history of war, death and inhumanity. There is no casual amusement to be had here. It is not fun. It is not entertainment, and it is not for the weak of stomach.

The past reviewer was spot on, so much unnecessary footage. If you're going to pretend that this is an honest interpretation of what actually happened then keep the ratio of snow-white-perfectly-proportioned-westerner victims in check compared to the normal domestic test subjects who were vastly underrepresented in this picture. They claim that they weren't trying to demonize the Japanese in that incredibly pretentious let-me-tell-you-how-to-interpret-this-movie segment at the beginning, but It sure seemed like the majority of horrors of war were apportioned to one side. War is dirty, war is nasty, war is savage. The Japanese did many evil things, and had many evil things done to them by Westerners, a little balance would be nice.

This movie is four hours long for one reason: director Andrey Iskanov wanted it to be. Lacking enough actual subject matter to warrant a four hour running time, he compensates by having virtually every scene go on for at least twice as long as necessary and inserting numerous shots of snow falling, each of which goes on for several minutes. I would say there's close to a half hour of footage of snow in this movie.We get surgeons meticulously putting on rubber gloves, prisoners being led down hallways, soldiers trudging through snow, bodies being chopped up, flesh being scraped off a skull, and countless other such sequences all in glorious real time. If tedium and banality are what Iskanov was going for he succeeded admirably.PHILOSOPHY OF A KNIFE is so devoid of any redeeming quality in its current state it barely even warrants discussion. One of the few positive things I can say about it is that I can see a riveting avant-garde horror movie hidden beneath all the baggage. Had he cut out 2/3 of the running time and tightened up all of his individual scenes, this could have been one of the most effective exercises in Hell-On-Earth sensory overload.Of course, in an introduction which brings new meaning to the word "pontification," Iskanov informs us that this is not a horror movie, though he expects us unsophisticated westerners to think it is. So maybe I'm even wrong about that. Maybe there's NOTHING good to say about this movie.Watching this movie has forced me to re-assess my opinion of MEN BEHIND THE SUN, which I thought was little more than an exploitive freak show as well. However, in MEN BEHIND THE SUN director T.F. Mou presented the atrocities in a brutally matter-of-fact manner and allowed us to sympathize somewhat with the prisoners. Now I'm thinking that Mou's film is at least somewhat earnest in its depictions of the horrors of Unit 731.In PHILOSOPHY, Iskanov re-creates the experiments as highly stylized set-pieces that look more like a Nine Inch Nails music video than an attempt to hit home the true horror of these activities. All (and I mean ALL) the prisoners who are tortured are young, good-looking Russian kids with no backstory whatsoever. I wonder how many female prisoners-of-war during World War II had perfect breasts and shaved pubic hair. And while MEN BEHIND THE SUN acknowledged that Russian, European and American prisoners did fall victim to Unit 731, PHILOSOPHY completely ignores the fact that the vast majority of victims were Chinese.And if what you want is nothing more than blood and guts, even that fails to live up to the hype. The effects (which Iskanov did himself) are amateurish and sloppy. Only a sequence in which a woman's teeth are pulled is even somewhat effective, not because it's well-done, but because pretty much everyone can imagine how much that would hurt. OLDBOY's teeth pulling scene is far more chilling and horrific than this.This long, boring, dishonest, self-indulgent movie is a major waste of time. I want my four plus hours back.