Philosophy of a Knife

Philosophy of a knife is a 4 hour long documentary recalling the atrocities of unit 731. This film has some real footage from ww2, along with interviews and of course the poorly made reanactments which are all compiled together in a pretty good way to create this movie.

The real ww2 footage is pretty good in this with some moments being really interesting, the interviews are also good but I do feel as if the person being interviewed is gratifying the atrocities in some way. However the reanactments are just aren't that great, for example the acting is just atrocious and there isn't a single bit of emotional response coming from the victims or even the pathologists and guards. Every time a victim gets strapped to a chair or an operating table they make absolutely zero attempt to struggle or even react to the pain being afflicted, the perpetrators also don't produce any emotional reactions either which is somewhat accurate to historical events but they should have also explored the different ways they couldve looked horrified at the orders given, giving those characters moments of humanity instead of making every member there a mindless psycho cutting into people randomly. Another problem I have with the reanactments is the actors themselves, the majority of unit 731 victims were Chinese with a small amount of russian and an extremely small amount of Americans, however philosophy of a knife has no Chinese victims and instead has a ton of white, russian and American prisoners. This not only white washes the cast of this film but also history itself which is extremely disrespectful to the actual victims. The final problem I have with the reanactments is the extreme butcher shop violence which are ment to be the experiments, the many pathologists just seem to slice and dice in a very non professional way, most of the experiments don't even seem like they have any contribution to science which is kind of the point of experimentation, like there's one "experiment" where they stick a cockroach up a prisoners vagina to see if it will come out the mouth, it isn't even explained why they do this it just happens. The real unit 731 had professional pathologists and doctors which did there work strategically and somewhat professionally when they conducted there inhumane experiments, the professionalism is also whats most horrifying about unit 731 as it shows that even though there profession is targeted at helping people, they still committed these atrocities and I do wish this theme was done better in this movie.

The effects in this film do vary in quality, from crappy effects which look lazy and don't fit the moment and to pretty good effects which did make me cover my face. The makeup is pretty decent as well which definitely excelled the scene at times. The camera quality however wasn't the best with moments being way to shakey and the majority of the camera work being uncomfortable shots just made it get pretty boring after a long while.

The music in this film though is fantastic, being a mixture of uncomfortable ambience and sinister tunes which made this film generally scary at times. A really good example of how good the music is can be seen in the title theme, as the song progresses the music gets more chaotic and distorted which may represent the stages of unit 731 throughout the years, going from questionable experimentation which still remains in the boundaries of ethics and then progresses to extremely evil and Inhumane experimentation which loses its grip on ethics. This progression could also be a euphemism on how the experiments went from improving biological warfare to having little to no connection with the betterment of humanity. Truly chilling stuff.

The intro to this film is pretty cool aswell, having some badass music and some pretty good footage. This moment is the only part of the movie I actually enjoyed and gave me some hope to this being a fairly good movie but was disappointed after seeing the rest of the film.

In conclusion even though this movie has its pretty good moments it still falls short due to the dramatic amount of gore and exploitation, the incredibly long runtime of 4 hours and the poor acting which does let down a really good idea to adapt this dark part of humanity into a movie like this.