James Cameron has announced that his film “Ghosts of Hiroshima” will not shy away from the harsh truth that dropping nuclear weapons on civilians was (and maybe even IS) actually bad. This follows his recent comments that Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer was a “moral cop out” for not portraying the effects of Oppenheimer’s work on the people of Japan, a sentiment shared by several commentators and Spike Lee.
Nolan’s naturally defenders came out in support of their cinematic messiah. “It would have been exploitative!”, “The film is Oppenheimer’s subjective POV”, “Its more effective to show how insulated his life was from the consequences of…” and so forth. But can’t these people see Hollywood’s universal capacity to finally humanise things that happened a long time ago and/or to foreigners? And who better than James Cameron, the master of sensitivity and nuance.
I can’t wait for James Cameron’s 3D IMAX Hiroshima movie. Without having to resort to watching a Japanese film (although sometimes they do have Godzilla in them), we’re finally going to see what life in 1945 Hiroshima was really like according to the fifth historian they asked and the guy who wrote Titanic.
There’ll be a middle class father who loves his wife and his kids and his country. A true American in everything except nationality, but he’ll dream of moving to New York someday, as all right-minded people do. They’ll cut around anything unsavoury about him and his culture. In fact there’ll be a scene where everyone around him salutes the emperor and our guy will look kind of uncomfortable about it, like he really wishes his country had democracy and fast food.
We can spice this up with really cool war sequences. Kamikazi pilots but from THEIR point of view! We’ve moved on a lot since Michael Bay did exactly that and it was still exploitative of a tragedy Americans actually have no right to explore. This time it will be sympathetic and epic.
Back on the ground, our main guy will be in love with a girl, maybe his wife, maybe a lover, but there’ll be conflict! She’ll be from a different class! Western audiences love that because they can kind of relate to it because they all know hot lawyers and doctors, etc., but they also imagine that this sort of thing affects people a lot more in foreign places like this one.
He’ll have a big romantic rendezvous with his estranged wife or lover, but oh no! Its August 6th and they’ve agreed to meet at 8.15am at her workplace: the Shima Hospita! They run towards each other. He tears off his salary man tie, and she’s in a nurses outfit but love is more important than whatever nurses do in a hospital and its just so beautiful how love conquers all every culture believes that I bet, but then there’s a blinding flash of light.
Oh boy…time for the good stuff. All the teenage boys lean forwards as the IMAX screen is filled with a spectacle of suffering way bigger than wimpy Nolan’s Trinity Test sequence that didn’t even have CG or mass casualties. Far more spectacularly heart-breaking than the Titanic sinking sequences (even after it was blown up to IMAX and released in 3D to be even more sensitive than ever). Better even than that time Cameron already showed an atomic blast in Terminator 2. We’re talking historic genocide on an unprecedented scale! Remember all those sensitive scenes of mass slaughter in the Avatar movies that so beautifully invoked the slaughter of native peoples around the world? Way bigger than that!
After this twenty minute sequence there’ll be another act or two of people trying to pick up the pieces and maybe a cut forward to older Japanese people trying to make sense of it all. That’s all going to be great for the best picture reel. And it sure was sensitive for Cameron to cast mostly Japanese actors in the roles. Sure they’ve got a few Asian American people with bigger names to pull the crowds. That’s just showbusiness! I’m sure Awkwafina will have done her research. I mean you can’t just cast Ken Watanabe in every role. Three max.
I really hope Cameron is wrong when he says that this will be his lowest grossing movie yet and I’m glad he’s already thinking about the box office because I actually think this will be THE most marketable depiction of a global atrocity that Hollywood has ever produced. Nolan will rue the day that he forgot to put Japanese people in his movie.
You know how this movie was pitched? James Cameron walked in to the room, wrote Hiroshima on the whiteboard, then crossed out the S and wrote “Hiro$hima”. Time to save Hollywood again, Jim.