Savage Christmas: Hong Kong 1941 (V&H, pt. 2) - Page 2© Jael Mehr
Page 2
Apr 14, 1999
There are some moments of strange irony in the movie, though. The first dramatized comment in this movie is from a young soldier, John Payne. Apparently writing to someone named Muggs, he says, "I'm in the same mood Homer must have been starting the Odyssey." This seems like a classic move in fiction - the foreshadowing. The Odyssey is a long, drawn-out epic about a group of men on their way home from the Trojan War. By the end of the journey, all but one of the men have died, and he has returned so changed that at first his own family doesn't recognize him.
As a film, though, this one is probably the most watchable of the three for the non-historian, even with its obvious bias. It works like a story - it basically follows a set timeline, and does a fairly decent job of explaining the lingo used in the film. The thing that impressed me more than anything about this episode (in fact, the entire series) was the way the McKenna brothers used casting to their advantage. Unlike Saving Private Ryan, in which the average soldier was about 30 years old, V&H shows the pictures of the men, and it's hard not to feel the horror of the war when you're looking at a boy who couldn't be more than 18 years old. Even the actors playing them range between their late teens and early to mid twenties, making them far more believable as soldiers. For the most part they are relatively unknown, even to Canadian viewers. That's the benefit of a made-for-CBC mini-series - as a rule, CBC doesn't succumb to the Hollywoodism of using big-name actors to pull in viewers. They didn't pull in Jim Carrey to speak as one of the characters. Pamela Anderson Lee isn't dressed up in a nurse's outfit crying over the boys lost in the war.
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