USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage

The movie just doesn't do service to the real events. If you're really interested in the story just read the Wikipedia page. You'll learn more about the events and it'll save you from wasting 2 hours and ten minutes of your life to this awful movie.

I always expect that Hollywood will bungle the details in military movies and usually give them a pass for those. There are SOOO many anachronisms and inaccuracies in this movie though. EVERY scene has something wrong with it. The ship itself, the uniforms, the orders given, the weapons, the lingo, even the sharks. It's beyond distracting. The most glaring example is that they the used a battleship to represent a cruiser. You can have a movie like U-571, which is fictional, and they have more accurate depictions of the submarines and even a German destroyer. Mario Van Peebles is like "hey, the USS Alabama is located in Mobile, let's go film on that." "It's the wrong type of ship though." "It's only a film based on true events, accuracy doesn't matter."

On top of that the writers couldn't have stuffed more cliché, trite military lingo into this movie if they tried. The focus they have on the sharks is weird, and inaccurate. The captains speech made me groan out load. Nicholas cage don't ever do another war movie again! If you've seen Windtalkers you know what I'm talking about. Again, if you really want to know what happened to the USS Indianapolis, take 10 mins and read the Wikipedia or better yet go to the library and find a book about it.

The true story of the Indianapolis is a compelling one of bravery, intrigue, unimaginable suffering and governmental cowardice. This movie never comes close to conveying any of that. It rushes through the set-up, never pausing for us to get to know any of the principals in any depth. The movie can't wait to get to the sharks, but when it does, it almost turns into a comedy of unconvincing action, gaps in logic, ridiculous dialogue and clumsy CGI. Poor Nic Cage is reduced to a near catatonic state, forced into unnatural situations and dubious decisions. In Jaws, Spielberg did a better job in five minutes with Quint's recounting of his Indianapolis experience than this movie does in two hours. A fiasco. McHale's Navy was more realistic.

Set in mid-1945 during World War II, the USS Indianapolis, led by Captain Charles McVay (Nicolas Cage), was secretly tasked to deliver parts of an atomic bomb (which would later be dropped on Hiroshima) unescorted to a naval base in the Pacific. Back in open sea after successfully delivering their cargo, the ship was torpedoed and sunk by a Japanese submarine in the Philippine Sea. The sailors spent five gruelling days with minimal supplies floating on life rafts in shark-infested waters. Only 317 of the original 1,196 crew members survive the ordeal.

The first hour of the film was quite brisk and eventful. The main storyline was laid out within the first scene. The backstory about some of the young sailors were introduced, oddly not too much on McVay himself. The USS Indianapolis embarked on its mission, torpedoed and sunk all within that first hour. However, this meant that the entire second hour would only be dealing about the survival ordeal of the sailors among the sharks awaiting rescue. It got maudlin and repetitive after the first few shark attacks. This was definitely not the war action film people were expecting to see.

The actors all seem to have come from the Nicolas Cage school of hammy acting. The major side story was about two friends who were in love with the same girl back home. Another side story was about a couple of sailors, one white, one black, constantly at odds with each other. There was also another side story about an arrogant young officer and his despicable attitude. All these rehashed side stories just served to fill out the rest of the running time before and after the sinking. The best actor for me would have to be Yutaka Takeuchi, the Japanese actor playing court-martial witness Commander Hashimoto, who displayed dignified subtly in his brief role.

For its Philippine release, this film's subtitle "Men of Courage" was replaced with "Disaster at (sic) Philippine Sea." However, for Filipino moviegoers expecting to actually see some part of the Philippines or see Filipinos in action in this film, they will be disappointed. The Philippines was mentioned but was never actually shown except for scene labels to establish the location. There was an extra card interrupting the closing credits stating how the search for the wreck of the Indianapolis was undertaken in 2001 in cooperation with the Philippine government and National Geographic. That was all about the Philippines here, nothing more. 5/10.

I was really interested in this movie but oh boy, what have these people done? This is one of the worst CGI works I have seen in years, they simply destroyed the movie as a whole. The ship appears washed out, never matches the surroundings. Every action scene is CGI'd, in a cheap way. Scenes on the deck, when explosions happen are clearly fireworks!!! I could not believe my eyes. And some scenes are repeated! I never reviewed on IMDb but created an account just to tell others what a bad work this was. I was really interested in the movie but the lousy work that has been done simply could not pass without being noticed. Watch it and see for yourself. What a disappointment!

A truly poor movie, with fictional "back story" added in, for no discernible reason that I can see. Using a battleship to represent a cruiser is a ludicrous idea(the USS Alabama was nearly three times the size of the Indianapolis,) and the resultant footage is awful..... the actual story has been trivialised and misrepresented, and Mr Cage hasn't done his acting credibility any good at all. The whole story has already been done to better effect and on a fraction of the budget of this shambolic effort in the made-for-TV movie "Mission of the Shark" .If you want to learn all about the events of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, either watch that movie, or watch the five minute sequence in the movie "Jaws" where Robert Shaw tells the whole story, simply, and brilliantly. This latest film really isn't worth the time it takes to watch it.....