Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on November 2009

©2009「沈まぬ太陽」製作委員会

Sometimes you run across a movie that makes you scratch your head and wonder how the director failed to realize he or she was making something nearly unwatchable. That’s the case with Setsuro Wakamatsu’s three-hour and twenty-minute drama Shizumanu Taiyo. The movie is based on the real-life case of a JAL employee who (eventually) gets swept up in the horrific crash of Flight 123 in August 1985—the worst single-plane accident in history. Onchi (Ken Watanabe) is a wholly decent man who is banished to Africa after fighting corruption at the airline. He returns to Japan just in time to have to deal with the crash and its aftermath. This movie is overwrought and ponderous, to put it lightly: the characters are either cartoonishly righteous or cartoonishly dishonest and, for all its good intentions, the flick can’t carry the audience along with it on the tedious journey. Last year’s Climber’s High was a much more compelling treatment of the same incident.