Battle for Saipan

Every male actor a hunk, every female actor a model. Then we get to the story; 'based on real events'. Yeah, very loosely. Casting should have been fired way before a camera was hired.

It just has that 80's made for TV feel, yup, worse than The A-Team, that bad. The dialogue is awful, the acting far too intense in the minor moments. Sometimes less is more, guys.

Of course the Japanese just throw themselves at machine guns like they were never trained in the basics. Of course the GI's are so proficient at unarmed combat. The Japanese would never have any idea about Karate or Jiu Jitsu. How could they despite inventing it?

Really not good in any way. Have the production team bigged this up on review sites? Mmmm?

Inauthentic, script was banal, costuming not historically accurate, fight scenes like a B Kung-Fu movie. Formulaic and uninspired.

This movie plays like a mediocre made for TV drama and just doesn't involve or demand much from the audience. I frankly couldn't finish watching it because I found it insulting and trite. I was disappointed to have paid good cash to see it and have it be so unoriginal and pedestrian. I only hope that some day a filmmaker will approach the Battle of Saipan authentically because it was truly a horrific sacrifice of American lives and deserves a better treatment than this refuse.

After writing my senior thesis on Saipan it is surprising to me that they decided to make a movie victimizing the Americans. The battle was a failure to fight for survival by the Japanese. What they're trying to cover is a large push back order by general Saito. About 4,000 men were gathered and told to give their lives in a suicidal charge. This charge was ordered knowing that the Japanese had no hope. The soldiers charged with sticks and rocks and whatever they had left. The wounded were killed. The movie is completely baffling. Should focus on the Japanese POV if it wanted to serve history.

I figured that this wasn't going to be a particularly great war movie, but I still opted to sit down and watch what writer and director Brandon Slagle had to offer.

And let's just say that if you opt to skip on "Battle for Saipan" on account of the premise of the synopsis and/or the cast ensemble, then you're not missing out on anything great here. Yeah, "Battle for Saipan" wasn't exactly in the same league with something like "Saving Private Ryan".

In fact, the storyline told in "Battle for Saipan" was pretty simplistic, almost to the point of being amateurish. So this wasn't exactly a golden moment in war cinema. Sure, it was watchable, but this was hardly a movie that warrants more than a single viewing. And that single viewing is somewhat of an ordeal to sit through in itself.

The movie starts out by stating that the battle that took place at Saipan was referred to as the D-Day of the Pacific. Well, strap yourself in firmly, because the movies utterly fails at depicting this in any sense, be it visually, action-wise, sheer number of soldiers present, well, you name it. Yeah, director Brandon Slagle delivered a movie that felt like it was recorded at an old abandoned building at some rundown farmstead. It didn't feel or look like anything from World War II.

What did work for "Battle for Saipan" was the costumes and the weapons though, as they looked authentic enough. And yeah, that definitely helped to keep the movie afloat.

I have to say that the likes of Casper Van Dien, Louis Mandylor and Jeff Fahey usually make adequate enough movies, but they had nothing to work with in "Battle for Saipan", and it was clearly showing on the screen.

If you enjoy World War II movies, then you might get a bit of a kick out of whatever transpires on the screen in "Battle for Saipan", but don't get your hopes up.

My rating of "Battle for Saipan" lands on a very generous four out of ten stars.

Perhaps I should've known better when I saw Casper's name in the cast list... Obviously low budget but there have been lots of good movies made on a shoestring Inaccuracies and anachronisms abound... From plastic buckles on the military gear, to wrong uniforms... having to burn "sensitive documents" which are obviously photocopies... The script is poorly written, the story is weak (while, given the events described, it did not have to be.) The sets are poorly designed, as are the special effects (i.e. Gore, explosions, etc.) Please, spare yourself the pain of my experience watching this, you, undoubtedly, have much better options available to you.