MOVIE REVIEW : Victors, Vanquished on Trial in ‘Prisoners of Sun’

How much evil has been committed by someone’s--or some government’s--conception of the “greater good”? “Prisoners of the Sun” (selected theaters), a polished, often beautifully acted, Australian trial drama, is about individuals crushed in the vise of policy. It’s about law and The Law, about generals, soldiers and puppets, the powerless and The Powers That Be.

The film was co-written by Brian Williams, the son of its real-life central character, military Captain and prosecutor John Williams. In the movie, the elder Williams, now a retired judge, is renamed Capt. Robert Cooper and played by Bryan Brown--and the younger Williams and co-writer Denis Whitburn use “Cooper’s” story, an incident from post-World War II Australian history, as a kind of burning glass on social contradictions.

The central incident is the war crimes trial of the Japanese officers and soldiers in charge of over a thousand Australian POWs on the island jungle of Ambon. It’s a grisly wartime episode, even if we see it only by inference: through testimony, occasional flashbacks and in the skulls and bones disinterred from mass graves in the film’s stark opening scene. Only 300 were left alive at war’s end; the rest were victims of inhumane conditions and execution.

But it’s part of the film’s point that war’s worst brutalities can be echoed afterward in civilized tribunals.

Cooper, initially repulsed, excoriates the Japanese soldiers as products of a “barbaric” culture. And, at first, we see the Japanese defendants much as the court, or the incensed, unruly spectators see them: as a stoical, silent mass, concealing guilty secrets. But, gradually, we see that the man most responsible for the barbarities on Ambon, Vice Adm. Baron Takahashi (an amalgam of several historical figures, played with an ironically puffed-up peacock splendor by “Star Trek’s” George Takei), will be almost automatically acquitted, since he is a member of the privileged class--deemed necessary by the Allied Forces to stabilize Occupied Japan and guard against violent social change.

And we also see that Takahashi’s underlings--ranging from the brutal Ikeuchi (Tetsu Watanabe) to the humane and troubled Tanaka (Toshi Shioya)--are expendable marionettes in a show trial. The strings that pull the limbs of the apparently impartial court show most obviously in the constant, mild-mannered but steely presence of an American Army major, Beckett--whom Terry O’Quinn infuses with the same unnerving double layer he put into “The Stepfather.”

Military trial movies--whether Kubrick’s great, paranoid “Paths of Glory” or Beresford’s more seemingly open-ended “Breaker Morant” (in which Bryan Brown was also a participant)--usually carry a heavy charge of outrage. So does this one. But Stephen Wallace (“Stir”), known in Australia as a “actor’s director,” tends to submerge himself: using the sort of style--long takes, “invisible” editing, subtle rhymes from scene to scene--that throws attention on to the cast. The cast responds, hitting the right broad, effective notes: Brown with his quiet fury, Takei with his preening arrogance, O’Quinn with his unnerving calm, Shioya with his shining idealism, Watanabe with his glowering bulldog mug, and Shinji Matsugae (as the defense attorney) with his nervous, punctilious politeness.

“Prisoners of the Sun” (rated R for violence and language) doesn’t really answer my opening question. What movie could? And it has some melodramatic flaws: points pushed too hard, characters examined too superficially. But it plays with that sophisticated premise in an interesting, illuminating way. If it’s not a great film, it’s at least solid, craftsmanlike, good. And decent-- in the best sense of the word.

‘Prisoners of the Sun’

Bryan Brown: Captain Cooper

George Takei: Baron Takahashi

Terry O’Quinn: Major Beckett

Toshi Shioya: Lt. Tanaka

A Village Roadshow Pictures presentation of a Charles Waterstreet and Siege production, released by Skouras Pictures. Director Stephen Wallace. Producers Charles Waterstreet, Denis Whitburn, Brian A. Williams. Executive producers Graham Burke, Greg Coote, John Tarnoff. Screenplay Whitburn, Williams. Cinematographer Russell Boyd. Editor Nicholas Beauman. Costumes Roger Kirk. Music David McHugh. Production design Bernard Hides. Running time: 1 hour, 49 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (language, violence).