Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticIn “Apocalypse ’45,” we see images of World War II — the last six months of it, when our forces were engaged in a grisly death-throes battle with the Japanese in the Pacific — that are more colorful, raw, and deeply naturalistic than the images we’re used to seeing.
And that footage hits us with the shock of the new.American soldiers blast their flamethrowers into caves, the oily fire whipping around like something out of a dragon’s mouth.
We’re shown the bombing of Tokyo from a mile over the city, the bombs exploding like clusters of orange dots on the map-like green landscape below.
On Okinawa, grenades burst into mounds of curling black smoke, and we see a Japanese woman on the Mariana Islands jump off a.
Read more on variety.com