(4 stars out of five)Steven Spielberg was, at one time, in negotiations to direct this picture. The directing duties eventually went over to Rob Marshall (Chicago) who did a decent job with it, although his relative inexperience (this is only his second feature, and his first was a musical) is apparent from time to time. No, the biggest problem with the film is something that not even Spielberg could have overcame: being an American production funded with American dollars, there's no way the producers would have poured so much money into something that wasn't in the English language... So here we have a film, set in Japan and with Asian actors, who all speak English instead of Japanese. It's a strange thing, and it just feels wrong... but there's nothing that could have really been done about it, unless it was a Japanese production from the start. Nevertheless, the film is beautifully shot, and the actors do amazingly well with conveying emotion in a language that's foreign to them. I still wonder, however, how much more powerful it would have been if the actors had spoken their language instead of (sometimes quite awkwardly) spitting out English. Oh well...
I'm pretty tempted to give this another half star, as it really was very well done and truly packed a punch, but this is one of those films where the story was so amazing, that it could have been done by pretty much anyone with at least decent results... I'm not so sure how much of Rob Marshall was in this film, and how much he really had to do to make it work. Most of the scenes in the beginning have a feeling of a lack of passion for the material... it almost feels like someone else picked up the movie from that point on...or maybe it's because you end up getting into the story and forgetting how lazily directed everything is... either way, the reason why this film is as good as it is...well, it's not Rob Marshall.
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