Fridae

The tsunami and nuclear meltdown has devastated hundreds of thousands of lives and livelihoods in eastern Japan but life has to go on. As much as it would be unseemly to do so, the Japanese are urged to continue with cherry blossom viewing parties or to enjoy Golden Week holidays this week. Here in Singapore, the best way to deal with the shock is to release a Japanese disaster movie involving explosions in the sea and to hold a charity gala for the tsunami victims. Singapore must have a very special breed of people to do this.

The Umizaru film series is a throwback to honest BS-free water-based disaster movies more in the vein of Wolfgang Peterson’s The Perfect Storm than the Poseidon or Titanic track. In other words, the disasters depicted here have been researched to survive the scrutiny of science and engineering geeks – even if the body count remains at absolutely zero.

In this final instalment, the disaster takes place on the mother of floating oil refineries. Like the recent tsunami and nuclear meltdown in real life, the film’s disaster combines a ship collision with this refinery with a severe “once in 50 years” typhoon. The coast guard is once again called to perform their unique zero-casualty evacuation and risk their lives to save the precious oil refinery – right in the midst of that typhoon.

The film brings back Hideaki Ito and Ryuta Sato to head the rescue operation, as well as the entire ops room staff to provide geek speak and computer simulations to explain how ships sink, as well as to provide the unique ops room drama of the Japanese disaster movie genre. Unlike the previous instalments of the series, Umizaru 3 is largely a sausage fest with Ai Kato relegated to an almost bit part. The emotional drama, the weeping, the confessions of personal weakness is all subsumed under the very macho male bonding between the rest of the cast.

If you are a fan of the earlier Umizaru films or liked the Ashton Kutcher vehicle The Guardian, this is for you.