BLACK SUN: THE NANKING MASSACRE is not the conventional exploitation movie you would expect from Tun Fei Mou, director of MEN BEHIND THE SUN, the infamously violent exploitation movie. BLACK SUN, also based on real events, uses a more documentary approach to disturb the viewers. There’s no real narrative, no main characters and no beginning and ending. The movie starts with a short historical explanation and then pushes us right into the darkest moment of the Sino-Japanese war. Scene by scene, we witness the terror inflicted on many victims, some trying to save their own lives by working with the enemy, while others try to hide or hopelessly fight back. 

Each of these moments usually ends up in a terribly violent sequence, which is usually followed by actual old footage, text or pictures to heighten the horror, which is extremely disturbing and very effective. The idea of inter-cutting the actual violence with real stock footage is indeed a very ingenious idea, unlike MEN BEHIND THE SUN, where you may have ended up giggling at the violence on screen. Well if you like black humour, in BLACK SUN, each time that a funny moment grows on you, it is cut short by the actual footage to make you think about the real situation behind the scene instead of simply just enjoying another violent exploitation film. If Tun Fei Mou wanted to sensitize people about the Nanking Massacre, he successfully achieved his goal, hands down. The only true weak point of the movie is that everything was shot in Mandarin. Hearing Japanese soldiers speak Mandarin took away from the credibility of the movie.

It is hard to talk about BLACK SUN without including political talk and even today it’s still a very hot topic in Chinese and Japanese society. The disastrous events at the 2004 Asian Cup final between Japan and China is a recent example of how Chinese people still feel about this historic event. However, it is hard to exactly point out whose fault it is. At the time, the Japanese government had a very strong influence over their population and was promoting the invasion of China to “liberate” it from western influence. But is that an excuse to not respect the rules of warfare established since 1864? As of today, Japan has not yet given a formal apology to the Chinese people, well at least not one that the Chinese are ready to accept. 

Enough of politics, so how about the guts and gore? For the gore hound there are some really shockingly cruel moments on screen. However, the special effects did not age very well, and some scenes look very stupid by today standards, if not for T. F. Mou’s quick editing. Overall, it is not as visceral, nor as constantly bloody as MEN BEHIND THE SUN, but disturbing nonetheless. 

BLACK SUN: THE NANKING MASSACRE is a really good way for people, who like Asian films and are not familiar with the event, to learn about it. Especially for North Americans, as there was much more than just America vs. Germany going on at the time. It is a shocking and thought-provoking movie for anyone who is interested in World War II. On a side note, Lu Chuan’s (Missing Gun, Kekexili: The Mountain Patrol) next project has been announced as a movie version on The Rape of Nanjing, so we can expect to revisit this dark part of the history soon again.