Review of Emperor (2012) by Thomas W — 18 Aug 2013

Emperor is a truly disappointing film merely because it should have been "so much better"! Sadly the film is just not very well made and the direction by Peter Webber (excellent before with Girl with a Pearl Earring and less-than-great with Hannibal Rising) is lacking as he has too much story to tell and keep straight as Emperor has many flashbacks and a few different storylines Webber does not cleanly keep separate.

Emperor is the story of an American soldier, General Fellers (Matthew Fox - 'Lost'), who is returning to Japan after the end of WWII following the dropping of the two bombs that decimated parts of Japan shortly before.

He is there as security detail for General Douglas MacArthur (Tommy Lee Jones - The Fugitive) and as an investigator as to whether or not Japan's Emperor should be tried for international war crimes by questioning his involvement in the war and the lead-up to it.

What role did the Emperor play? This is the story that should have taken up the bulk of the story; but Webber decides to intercut this story with flashbacks of Feller's earlier romance many years before the war -- both stateside and in a pre-war Japan -- with a young Japanese girl (Eriko Hatsune - Norwegian Wood) whose family frowns upon a romance with an American.

The story is rather un-focused as there is too much story here. It isn't a full-fledged romance nor is it a war-film. I am not sure if the movie wanted to appeal to several different audiences and was hoping for a weepy war romance (think .

.. ironically ... of Pearl Harbor); but told in this manner it will appeal to even fewer. Both stories suffer from lack of development and clear story telling and I cannot really imagine this appealing to anybody at all.

It is a shame because one of these stories could have been a most interesting film/story.