Okamoto is a director that seems to get very little exposure outside of his most famous work Sword of Doom. Few know his equally bleak and gorgeous Samurai Assassin and I've yet to encounter anyone who has seen Human Bullet which is a shame, because it is an incredibly unique piece of war satire.
The movie which takes place in the final days of world war 2 is centred on a gangly little guy trying to make his way through the war in search of sex, a glorious death or at least some rest, which luckily for him eventually earns him a post manning a torpedo in the middle of nowhere in wait for any american ships to pass by. This wrap-around story is complemented by scenes of his previous experiences in the absurd mechanism that is the military. There's a very dark humorous edge here you don't find that often outside of Catch22. I think many anti-war movies make the mistake of showing war as constant horrific violence to get across its destructive nature, yet when you read memoirs of soldiers from the world wars their description sounds more like long stretches of mind-numbing boredom interspersed with sudden bursts of unbelievable trauma followed by a terrible silence, and their life through all of this is being controlled and held together by an apparatus that doesn't really knows what it's doing and just follows rules that were written by people who clearly didn't have bullets whizzing around them all day. There's always a dispassionate bureaucratic edge to war and the commitment of its atrocities that to me is truly more frightening than anything else. Human Bullet gets this absurd juxtaposition down extremely well.
I can imagine many of the strange situations in this film might be based on Okamoto's own life. He was in the precise age range that got used as cannon fodder by the thousands in order to stave off the inevitable defeat of imperial Japan. There's often a bleakness and grimness to many other directors from that generation especially people like Kinji Fukasaku. Yet Human Bullet never loses its humour despite the morose nature of its narrative and thus feels a lot more like its contemporary Japanese nouvelle vague films whose directors tended to be a bit younger and inspired by 60s counter culture. This is underlined by a nice little narrative bow to 1960s Japan and its careless youth. At times Human Bullet is downright cute and plays more like a live action manga than anything else. It's incredibly dense with subtle humour and commentary and thus warrants repeat viewings. After Samurai Assassin and this one I definitely feel compelled to do a deeper dive into Okamoto's filmography.
