Review of Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983) by Sam S — 08 Aug 2012

David Bowie's relentlessly glamorous appearance , impervious to the harsh realities of a brutal Japanese POW camp, is a good metaphor for this movie. It is, on balance, a non-stop hit parade of cliches and groan-inducing grand gestures; a series of badly written, racist, homoerotic, sadomasochistic vignettes.

If not or the relatively high ratings on IMDB/RT/Netflix I would have tuned out in the first twenty minutes, but I hung on hoping for something interesting to happen like, for example, David Bowie icing some bad guys with a slick machine gun - the writing was hopeless, but there had to be something worth watching, right? Well, my reasoning was fatally flawed; cult status really affects who learns about films and how they rate them! There is really nothing redeeming about this movie at all.

Excellent cinematography and several decent performances do not at all compensate for listless writing and laughably shatneresque fight sequences. This film is, perhaps, most interesting as a case study about what could go terribly wrong making films about The Exception Westerner Who Earns the Grudging Respect of Idealistic Foreigners In Spite of their Fatally Outdated Beliefs and Ethics.

I thought a lot about Edward Said's remarks in Orientalism about the need of the West to feminize the East while watching this movie. You seriously have to ask yourself "WTFIGO?" when you see a man waxing on about Japanese philosophy whilst wearing, without exaggeration, more eyeliner than Ziggy Stardust.