The screenwriters, the producers, the entire cast of this schlock piece should be rounded up and escorted to the brig and interrogated one by one as to who ate the strawberries from the ships' ice cream stores. Oooooops. That is another movie entirely, The Caine Mutiny, a truly classic movie on every level.
This movie. Oh God help us. This movie. This is quite possibly the stupidest movie ever made. I can see it now. Hollywood aging rat pack producers bang on Cage's mansion door and beg him to salvage this "treatment" of a script.
"Please Nick. Please rescue us from this shipwreck. We'll pay you anything. We know your careers is in tatters. We know your desperate. We know you need the cash. Please. Please. Pleeeeeeeze!
Nick stares at the ceiling from his lazy boy. "Sure, I'll do it, boys. But, you'll need to supply me with the proper amount of blow before I commit to such a venture"
From inexplicable beginning to absurd end, the movie meanders like a deaf, dumb, blind man trying desperately to make sense of the senseless. They didn't even bother to get the CGI even close to real. Who cares? They didn't even bother to get the dialogue into semi coherent shape. Who cares? Gee whiz. They didn't even bother to press the uniforms. Anybody who spent two seconds in the military knows for darn sure that the anal retentive navy always has to have those damned uniforms pressed to a crisp at all times, even before they are right about to be blown to hell from a Japanese torpedo strike.
Seriously, this movie is a direct insult to the hundreds of brave men who actually did die a slow, vicious bloody death in the waters of the Pacific after delivering the bomb. Their suffering and bravery gave meaning to the word, hero. And Captain Charles Butler McVay III, the actual captain of the Indianapolis who was made a scapegoat by the Pentagon and politicians saw his life destroyed after this tragedy at sea. He took those bogus court martial trials like a man, with quiet nobility. The families of the dead sailors mailed him death threats for decades after that. They repeatedly called him to threaten his life many times. He suffered quietly through all of that hell. Then one day in November, 1968, he walked out into his front yard, holding the doll of a toy sailor in the left hand, given to him as a child and a pistol in the other hand and shot himself.
These real stories of heroism, nobility, and true courage are paid a deep disservice by this horrible movie. The real story of the U.S.S. Indianapolis is heroism at its finest and most legendary. You men will always be remembered by those who are committed to knowing their history and the truth.
Review of USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage
