"Emperor" cheapened by romance

“Emperor” is not your typical World War II film.

You don’t see a bunch of Americans shootin’ up the East — in fact, the most onscreen violence is seen when some Japanese children throw rocks at an American.

But what the film lacks in violence, it makes up for in devastation. Focusing on the aftermath of World War II in Japan, “Emperor” shows us a side of the conflict we rarely get in war films. We get an inside view of the politics and complications involved in rebuilding a devastated nation while attempting to bring justice to war criminals.

General Bonner Fellers (Matthew Fox) is tasked with finding a way to either prove Emperor Hirohito innocent or hang him as a war criminal. While General Douglas MacArthur (Tommy Lee Jones) pushes for the popular American sentiment to hang Hirohito, Fellers searches for the truth in an apocalyptic Japan.

But all of this goes up in a mushroom cloud when a clichéd love story is introduced.
Apparently Fellers’ desire to make the right decision stems from his love for Aya, the Japanese girl he fell in love with at a college in the United States. Once this story is introduced, Feller’s hopeless search for Aya continuously interrupts the fascinating political plot.

And when he’s not searching for her, he’s chasing flashbacks that are supposed to show a fascinating American-Japanese dynamic being played out, but really it’s just every forbidden love story we’ve ever seen.

Jones’ General MacArthur is good, but it’s no great feat for the actor. Essentially, the man plays every part we’ve ever seen him play, and while the performance is fitting, it’s nothing to write home about.

Perhaps the best actors in the film are those playing the Japanese adversaries who get little more than one or two scenes. They are the ones who manage to display an intense rage and anger against their American counterparts while keeping a traditional civility and honor about them.

Compared to the Americans who just burst on the scene and angrily scare their Japanese cohorts, actors such as Kaori Momoi should really be given the credit for many scenes of this film.

Overall, the political story is a fascinating one worth telling and is done quite wonderfully. However, the focus on the love plot makes the film cheap, common and cliché.

By Sam Ostrowski