GamerTab That was an excellent one.

ShangLuda Admirable film.

Sexyloutak Absolutely the worst movie.

Derrick Gibbons An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

helvin3 If you want to watch this - be prepared to feel sick and ball your eyes out and just feel emotionally drained afterwards... and this is coming from someone who is self-confessed emotionally unavailable. I will only recommend this film to others with a clear warning of what they're getting themselves into, but damn does this need to be watched by everyone. Thank f*** for documentaries like this existing in the world - as much as some people might not like the information being out there - it needs to be!!! Despite how graphic it is, I would love this to start being shown to kids all around the world - it is the perfect doco for showing how evil people can be, and how nothing else matters (race, country, religious beliefs, sexuality etc) when we should all just plain and simply focus our lives on NOT being evil b@stards. This is a weird review, I know. It's just I'm having so many feels right now. GAH!

tomgillespie2002 Without the focus on the heroic efforts of a small group of European and American expatriates, Nanking the film would be a near unbearable experience. The Nanking Massacre, or The Rape of Nanking as it's widely referred to, took place over a 6 week period in 1937. The Chinese capital city was invaded by Japanese troops, resulting in 200,000 (or more depending on varying estimates) innocent people raped and slaughtered. Tales of civilians being forced to have sex with corpses or family members, unborn foetus's being cut out of their mother's belly with bayonet's, or the gang-rape of small girls and boys are all confirmed here. But Nanking achieves its power not through shocking and repulsing but by showing the triumph of the human spirit in the face of hell on Earth.Although plenty of archival footage is used - from the beautiful, pulsating Nanking sitting proudly as China's capital, to it's destruction through heavy bombing - a bulk of the film consists of readings by actors of diary entries written by the likes of Nazi party member John Rabe and American missionary Minnie Vautrin. Rabe and Vautrin were part of a small, wealthy group of men and women who decided against fleeing Naking, and set up a 'Safety Zone' inside the city. The actors, including the likes of Jurgen Prochnow, Mariel Hemingway, Woody Harrelson and Stephen Dorff, are earnest and understated in their delivery, and this helps give these moments an urgency, when it could have come off as trying to add some Hollywood gloss to a devastating event.The Japanese agreed to the implementation of the safety zone, but their soldiers would parade the grounds, raping women at will and dragging men off to be executed on mass for being suspected enemy soldiers. Still, the protection offered by Rabe, Vautrin, Bob Wilson et al is estimated at being responsible for the survival of 200,000 Chinese lives. This is hard stuff to watch, one of the most despicable war crimes ever committed - interviews with Chinese survivors and seemingly remorseless and disconnected Japanese soldiers hit particularly hard - but this is essential viewing, proving that in order to move forward, we must look back.www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

rlange-3 I've read several books on Nanking and what happened there. Clearly there were an appalling series of atrocities which the movie documents well.But what was the point of having a bunch of Hollywood actors reading these lines? That contributed nothing at all in terms of understanding. If anything, it produces a kind of jarring dissonance watching someone like Harrelson who wants to see the US walk away from Iraq and leave people to suffer the same fate as Nanking, presuming to lecture us through his character about how awful the Japanese were. Isn't this the same Hollywood batch that talks up three minutes of waterboarding as if it were in the same league as what happened at Nanking? Personally I wish they had just shut up and let the narrative proceed.The films of the era were superb, as were the individual stories and anecdotes told by participants, including the Japanese soldiers. The coverage is very one sided, with the Chinese given the upper hand, but then the real events explain much of that. But the producers might have pointed out that Chinese soldiers didn't exactly treat civilian populations with kid gloves either. That's the way wars are fought and won in the main; Nanking was simply a particularly egregious example.Some are claiming this is an "antiwar" movie. Those in favor of letting the world live under Japanese and Nazi Imperialism so that there are no more wartime atrocities are simply exchanging the faster agony of war to the slow agony of peace under dictatorship.It would be really great to see these Hollywood 'stars' in a documentary about self-congratulatory hypocrisy. They kind of stunk this one up. The film would have been better without them.

elskootero-1 I've been studying Japanese and Russian War atrocities for more than 30 years and STILL wonder why Hitler and the Nazis get 99% of the "holocaust" rap. Most people don't know of the rape of Nanking and countless other acts of Jap barbarism, like the fact that the Japanese were DIRECTLY responsible for over 14 million deaths NOT due to war combat, and the Russians, under DIRECT orders from Stalin, killed more than 16 million. Yet all you ever seem to hear is the 6 million Jews that the Nazis killed. YES YES YES, the holocaust was an obscene tragedy of the worst kind, but why don't we rap the Japs for their 14 million victims-after all, the world leaned on us for herding the Japs living in the US into internment camps during the war and then waiting 35 some years to repay them a part of what they lost; but what reparations have the Japanese made to the world for THEIR atrocities? THEY HAVEN'T EVEN ADMITTED IT TO THEIR OWN PEOPLE!! Japanese world history goes up to 1940,then skips to 1946 and continues to the present day!?!?!? This movie is a MUST-SEE! It is accurate, factual, and chilling! Go see it! And Iris Chang, may you rest in eternal peace, dear lady!