Capsule Review, minimal spoilers:

The Great War of Archimedes is a Japanese film I found on DVD recently. You’d think this is a war film, but it really isn’t. Sure, the opening of the film is the last battle of the Yamato, and it’s pretty decent CGI, but that’s not what the movie’s about. A handful of minutes at the beginning, that’s almost all you get of the Yamato.

It’s really about the Japanese navy in the 1930s . As with the rest of the world, they are suffering a depression, and funding for military projects is low. At the forefront, Admiral Yamamoto is proposing to build a large aircraft carrier, while another admiral wants a super battleship. Only one can be budgeted. Yamamoto stumbles across a math nerd, and contrives a plan to have this civilian calculate the cost of building the battleship, which was for somewhat less than the carrier.

The navy stonewalls the man’s attempt to research the battleship’s costs at every turn, but he finds ways around the bureaucracy to get the data he needs, ruffling many feathers along the way. I won’t say more, but the final scenes (redeem the movie. One could argue that they were written in the present and include revisionist history. In theory, they may not reflect the actual thinking of the people at the time. It’s hard to say, but I think there was some tweaking of certain characters that made it possible.

I did watch it with English subtitles, as dubbed lines don’t necessarily reflect the original cast’s inflections and tone. I may go back one day and watch it in English, but I’m not in a rush to do that. There is also a scene or two of the IJN Nagato (in murky CGI), but that’s about all the ‘excitement’ of the battleships you get. The title is pretty misleading. As a war movie, I would rate it pretty low. However, I found the story was decent enough to give it a positive recommendation, if you’re not expecting a true war story.