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RATING:   
It's strange how a country as pop-culturally individualistic as Japan is, can still adopt old-school takes on Hollywood prototypes to churn out films such as Midnight Eagle.
The two-hour cinematic anachronism by Izuru Narushima has a distinct '80s artificiality, complete with phoney armed forces strategy sessions and soap opera melodrama scored to tacky synthesised music.
Based on the popular novel by Tetsuo Takashima and boasting the full cooperation of Japan's Ministry of Defence, the story focuses on a jaded war photographer (Takao Osawa) who tries to locate a crashed American stealth jet with an active nuke in the bitter snow-capped Northern Japan Alps.
As the film creeps to its brazenly-manipulated ending of heroic self-sacrifice to save the nation, the emotion that it triggers is not empathy, but scoff — about the film's concern with inflated nationalist pride rather than logic. - TODAY/sh
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