Ono­da: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle

Most peo­ple who have stud­ied his­to­ry know the tale of the Japan­ese sol­dier who stood guard­ing his post dur­ing World War Two and refused to stand down until offi­cial­ly relieved by his com­mand­ing officer.

It has become syn­ony­mous with the quaint spec­ta­cle of war, where such con­fu­sion high­lights the absur­di­ty of extend­ed con­flict. Arthur Harari’s Ono­da: 10,000 Nights in the Jun­gle is the sto­ry of that sol­dier, told with an empha­sis on the rav­ages of time and the nox­ious qual­i­ties of extreme patriotism.

It is a film about state mind con­trol more than it is a chron­i­cle of human psy­chol­o­gy gone awry. If any­thing, Hiroo Ono­da, here played by Yuya Endo, is pre­sent­ed as rather a meek fig­ure who is quite lit­er­al­ly set in his ways when spend­ing over a quar­ter of a cen­tu­ry clutch­ing his rifle, ready to ward off an impend­ing attack.

He’s intro­duced as a green­horn who is induct­ed into the mil­i­tary and man­ages to rise up the ranks, despite the fact his prep­py resolve caus­es him to clash with fel­low offi­cers. With the rank of lieu­tenant, he is post­ed to a small, strate­gi­cal­ly vital island in the Philip­pines and told to make sure the local air­field remains oper­a­tional come hell or high water. And if things get bad, sui­cide is not an option: Ona­da and his men must stand tall until the last breath is ripped from them by the encroach­ing enemy.

There is some­thing Her­zo­gian in Hatari’s French-pro­duced epic, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the way it chron­i­cles the mono­ma­ni­a­cal ten­den­cies of a man who just can­not be swayed by the hard evi­dence with which he is often pre­sent­ed. As time ticks on, the mem­bers of his pla­toon either choose to desert or are struck down by ill­ness (or the occa­sion­al bul­let), leav­ing Ono­da to even­tu­al­ly fly solo into the 1970s.

Quite ear­ly on in the ordeal, per­ceived ene­my com­bat­ants are heard yelling the war is over while attempt­ing to defend them­selves from gun­fire, but Ono­da chalks this up as a trap – the malev­o­lent pro­pa­gan­da of a foe quick to adopt dirty tac­tics to win out the day. He does this over and over and over, much to his own psy­cho­log­i­cal detriment.

In a world where the del­uge of tox­ic opin­ion spew­ing from social media plat­forms has the abil­i­ty to cor­rupt a ratio­nal mind, it’s a very pre­scient film in the way its sub­ject is a per­son who has been whol­ly con­vinced of his des­tiny, to the point where he refus­es to ques­tion the log­ic of his dire circumstance.

There are occa­sion­al shoot-outs and sor­ties against natives, but much of the film com­pris­es Onoda’s crooked and sense-twist­ing ratio­nale for reach­ing this invis­i­ble fin­ish line. Harari’s film is a prac­ti­cal, sim­ple and sad­den­ing doc­u­ment of every­day madness.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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