Melissa Tamminga’s review published on Letterboxd:
There's a relentlessness to the violence here that should be numbing, skirmish after skirmish, battle after battle, blood spurting, bombs exploding, men flailing in agony. It doesn't stop. It goes on and on. And I cannot tell, in the arc of the story, which battle will be the last one. I can't see the end. One would think I'd just stop caring, that I'd just shut down. Or else become bored.
And the Japanese enemy soldiers should be hollow figures; nothing obvious is done to make them human. When they die, it should feel like a victory; it should feel like something has been won.
But the relentless violence isn't numbing. It only hurts more as time goes on. Each new death still feels new. Each is still sharp.
And the enemy soldiers' deaths somehow feel weighty. When one of "our" men kills his enemy, something in the soul dies. Every time.
And yet through all this the violence, the death does not seem gratuitous; it does not seem meant to merely provoke. I'm left, in the end, in a profoundly meditative state of mind.
Maybe I'm naive. I haven't, actually, seen what seem to be considered the modern classics in war films. I haven't seen Saving Private Ryan. I haven't seen Full Metal Jacket. I haven't seen Platoon.
But this feels like a significant war film to me. Men are given medals for heroism, and while I recognize that heroism, I am not forced into mere patriotism. But neither am I forced into cynicism. These lives are wasted and heroic, both at once.
In the end, one man turns to the faith of his childhood. Another man continues in the faith of his people - and it seems, right. The only thing he can do, after what he's seen, after what he's done. Perhaps that's the only response I can offer, too, to such a tangle of heroic good and desperate evil in the human life. It's a thing that is beyond me.
And for Woo to offer me a film that embraces that vision of humanity, without making me despair and without pushing a blind sentimentality? Well. Yes, I think that's significant.