The film takes the liberty of a technological enhancement that, I think, pays off spectacularly. The standard black-and-white images that bored me as a child were a way of keeping the WWII narrative restricted to something stuffy and official.Īs you watch “Apocalypse ’45,” the story of what war is only becomes deeper. government was only too happy to keep a lid on. Why is this material being released now? Just a guess, but my sense is that the graphic power of the footage is something the U.S. Yet TV documentaries like “World War II in Colour” and Ken Burns’ “The War” have revealed World War II with far greater immediacy, and “Apocalypse ’45,” which is being released today (the 75th anniversary of V-J Day), continues that mission, with momentous results.ĭirected by Erik Nelson, the film was drawn from 700 reels of archival color footage, never before seen by the public, that have been sitting in a vault in the National Archives and have been digitally restored to 4K. I’ve often felt that way watching old war footage. The ships and planes, the soldiers and bombs didn’t seem entirely real, because to my eyes they were part of an antiquated landscape that looked like it literally existed inside a newsreel. Yet I was also reacting to how distant, scratchy, and old-fashioned the stock images looked. After a few minutes, I would turn away, bored by a conflict that looked like it was taking place in some black-and-white netherworld from another century. When I was growing up, WWII documentaries were grainy, mottled affairs, often with a stentorian narrator, that I’d catch a snippet of on television, usually because my father watched them obsessively. (We see haunting footage of the bomb’s survivors, who are like mangled ghosts.) The documentary is also filled with the faces (and sometimes the dead bodies) of American soldiers, most of whom look eerily contemporary. As for the city of Hiroshima, filmed seven months after the atomic bomb was dropped there, it’s a flattened, debris-strewn hellscape of desolation that looks like it could have been filmed yesterday. On Okinawa, grenades burst into mounds of curling black smoke, and we see a Japanese woman on the Mariana Islands jump off a cliff rather than allow herself to be taken alive. We’re shown the bombing of Tokyo from a mile over the city, the bombs exploding like clusters of orange dots on the map-like green landscape below. And that footage hits us with the shock of the new.Īmerican soldiers blast their flamethrowers into caves, the oily fire whipping around like something out of a dragon’s mouth. In “ Apocalypse ’45,” we see images of World War II - the last six months of it, when our forces were engaged in a grisly death-throes battle with the Japanese in the Pacific - that are more colorful, raw, and deeply naturalistic than the images we’re used to seeing.
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