The Human Bullet

A soldier has spent the whole of the war in the Japanese army and his devotion has never wavered. But as the war nears its end his commanding officers grow more and more desperate and push their men to ever more absurd extremes. The absurdity of the orders from above reaches its height when the hero is assigned to drive a one man submarine into the hull of an enemy ship. The film tells this not as heroism but as waste, and holds the ridiculous and the appalling inside the same scene. The account does not declare the army an enemy; it shows how a chain of command works. The soldier himself is at no point made an object of mockery. Minori Terada plays the lead in Kihachi Okamoto’s hundred and sixteen minute Japanese film, completed in 1968.