Hiroshima

Hiroshima is a great film, originally made for cable, about events leading up to the A-bomb being dropped on Japan. It shows the Japanese perspective very well and is one of the better WW2 films of recent years. Surprisingly, it is mostly a Canadian production that is very accurate with the facts they put on screen. Very well done.

This is a brilliant, meticulous recreation of the events, both political and military, leading up to the tragic attack on Hiroshima in August 1945.

Brilliant performance by Kenneth Welsh as the Missouri haberdasher President Truman, strangely ill-dressed throughout this film in his trademark double-breasted suit and multi-coloured shoes. Here, Truman is a simplistic, Forrest Gump style president grappling with enormous moral issues about using the new ‘gadget'.

The excellent cinematography recreates the story in newsreel style footage, intercut with interviews with several people from the time. Also, shows the Japanese situation in Tokyo and the hardline military people on both sides.

Definitely one of the best historical movies I've seen. Doesn't cast political dispersions on the events or judge people in hindsight, simply gives a relatively even view of it from all sides (except for the Soviets, which would have been a good addition, if its ever even been discovered).

They did a really good job of mixing the B&W with color, old with new footage, etc. If you get a chance to see it, check it out.

First of all, it would have been absolutely impossible to find a actor who looked and acted more like Harry Truman that Kenneth Walsh. Second, the most fascinating aspects of this movie relate to what was happening in Japan at the closing of the war. The idea that a majority of the military officers would have rather seen Japan cease to exist as a people than to surrender really provides some counter-balance to all of the recent revisionist history that claims that Japan was in the process of surrendering and that the U.S. used the A-bomb simply to avenge earlier Japanese treachery. "Hiroshima" is historical film-making at its best.

This is an outstanding production. And I think it no coincidence that it wasn't produced in the US.

Over 50 years later, American emotions still run high about our use of nuclear weapons against Japan; the recent backlash against the Smithsonian exhibit is proof. This film is a nuanced, balanced, objective treatment with, as far as I can tell, remarkable historical accuracy. One sees just how simplistic and myopic the leaders of both sides were as they made (or avoided making) momentous decisions that affected the entire future of the human race. The one voice of reason, scientist Leo Szilard, is brushed off with hardly a hearing.

This film is an effective indictment of our human propensity to place enormous powers in the hands of just a few individuals. I doubt any American producer could have made it.

The film deftly mixes historical footage with re-enacted scenes using actors. Normally this sort of thing is rather jarring, but here it works. Even the transitions between the real Truman in newsreel footage and the actor playing him work well.