The dialogue is trite, preventing any development of the characters (weakly portrayed by Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne and Carrie-Anne Moss). There's an ugly aesthetic, too. The plot isn’t explained very well and there's not even much action – just a lot of “enigmatic” non-conversations that go nowhere. You get no sense whatsoever of the wider world or the notion that humanity is in peril.
I really couldn’t see what all the fuss was about.
There’s a lot of gore but very little dramatic tension, partly because you see way too much of the werewolf. No mystery or suspense can survive close-up scenes of a monster that looks slightly ridiculous.
A far better film is American Werewolf in London (1981), in which director John Landis addresses similar subject matter with wit and imagination.
Andrew Garfield is sympathetic as the religious young man who will not compromise his principles by picking up a gun. Teresa Palmer and Hugo Weaving are watchable as Doss’s wife Dorothy and his troubled, alcoholic father.
It’s compelling stuff. The battle scenes are brutal and all-too-convincingly real-looking. If there’s a flaw it’s that the Japanese are generally treated as a faceless enemy, although the film eventually addresses this by showing Doss helping victims on the other side as well. It’s not morally simplistic, either. The story addresses the irony that despite the strength of his principles, his life is nevertheless saved by men using guns.
I didn't like the introduction of real interview footage at the very end. Either dramatise the story or make a documentary about it. Why blend the two? The same trick was used to equally jarring effect in Downfall. Also, on reading up on the story I was a little disappointed to learn that a key scene in which the young Doss nearly kills his father never actually happened. The facts are remarkable enough that there was no need to make things up.
