Yes, I know I waited too damn long to watch the next part of Masaki Kobayashi's towering The Human Condition. Sue me. Anyhow, here are my thoughts about it. It's incredibly well photographed, using its widescreen cinematography in that gorgeous way that only Japanese filmmakers from the 50s and 60s really understood. The story became a bit repetitive: the lead character endures beatings and humiliations, things around him change, he endures more beatings and humiliations, rinse and repeat. There's less narrative variety than in Part One. Still, many of the scenes are breathtakingly powerful. The two best in my opinion are the scene where the abused bespectacled private accidentally shoots and kills himself in a bathroom stall seconds after resolving not to kill himself and a moment near the very end where the protagonist's group is annihilated by a Soviet tank unit. Two terrified Japanese soldiers look out at each other from their foxholes and desperately reach out to the other. But for what? A moment of human contact? Sympathy? Love? Comfort? It hardly matters since the moment their hands touch they are both obliterated by a tank shell.
7/10
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