"Beach Red" seams to divide the commentators into two distinctively different tribes, the ones that love it and the ones that hate it. There don't seem to be a middle of the road opinion on this movie, so there's mine. I've seen this movie after I heard some good words on it's originality, and I just glanced through user comments on IMDb missing all the bad reviews. I've seen this film on it's own merit and here is what I think.
"Beach Red" is surely one of the strangest and most different war movies of all times, and is particularly original for it's era. Up until the beginning 70's when all the Vietnam resentment started to flow over Hollywood,so the movies like Catch-22 and MASH started to appear, there simply was no war movie that didn't look like "Objective Burma", "Sands of Iwo Jima" or if you want complete silliness "Bridge on the river Kwai". "Beach Red" certainly moved boundaries, it has some school play acting, but the mood of the war is accurately portrayed. Flashbacks are the core of that different approach and look and feel of those is particularly good. One of the reviewers objected that flashbacks show the women of principal American characters with 60's makeup,hairstyles and their homes furnished in 60's style, but they missed that the Japenese women and children were all shown in traditional surroundings and clothes and that's just the point Wilde wanted to make, a great difference in the way of living and culture, and draw a parallel between all wars between cultures from WWII to Vietnam. So the soldiers fight in Phillippines but it looks like they were leaving their loved ones for Vietnam. There is a link between than and now, war is always the same only the settings are different, and that is very well shown in "Beach Red", in which Japanese soldiers don't conveniently speak English with Japanese accent, but Japanese and act like them. Give this movie a try, it may require some patience and understanding but it won't let you down.
"Beach Red" is surely one of the strangest and most different war movies of all times, and is particularly original for it's era. Up until the beginning 70's when all the Vietnam resentment started to flow over Hollywood,so the movies like Catch-22 and MASH started to appear, there simply was no war movie that didn't look like "Objective Burma", "Sands of Iwo Jima" or if you want complete silliness "Bridge on the river Kwai". "Beach Red" certainly moved boundaries, it has some school play acting, but the mood of the war is accurately portrayed. Flashbacks are the core of that different approach and look and feel of those is particularly good. One of the reviewers objected that flashbacks show the women of principal American characters with 60's makeup,hairstyles and their homes furnished in 60's style, but they missed that the Japenese women and children were all shown in traditional surroundings and clothes and that's just the point Wilde wanted to make, a great difference in the way of living and culture, and draw a parallel between all wars between cultures from WWII to Vietnam. So the soldiers fight in Phillippines but it looks like they were leaving their loved ones for Vietnam. There is a link between than and now, war is always the same only the settings are different, and that is very well shown in "Beach Red", in which Japanese soldiers don't conveniently speak English with Japanese accent, but Japanese and act like them. Give this movie a try, it may require some patience and understanding but it won't let you down.