Yamato

April 1945. Yamato, the largest battleship in the Japanese navy, sails for Okinawa. The order is plain: the ship will not get there and the crew will not come back. The film looks back from the present, with one of the survivors describing that day years later. Most of the men aboard are boys of seventeen and eighteen. It tells who died for what, what the men giving the orders were thinking, and what was left of that ship. Yamato went down on 7 April; close to three thousand men died. Junya Satō directs; two hours and twenty-three minutes, adapted from Jun Henmi's book, with Takashi Sorimachi and Yu Aoi in the cast. Part of the ship was built at full size for the production, and that set was later opened to visitors.