Steineded How sad is this?

ThedevilChoose When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

Freeman This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Justina The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Leofwine_draca ATTACK FORCE Z is a little-known low budget war film from Australia, featuring an all-star cast of familiar faces. The film was shot in Taiwan and also features a wealth of talent from a Chinese cast, including former Shaw Brothers star Jimmy Wang Yu who is completely unrecognisable playing a Japanese official.This film follows the usual men-on-a-mission format with Mel Gibson, John Phillip Law, and Sam Neill teaming up rescue the survivors of a plane crash who are hiding out from local Japanese forces. The low budget nature of the production actually works in the film's favour, giving it a grittily realistic look, and I loved the small scale nature of the action scenes which zing with excitement. None of the cast are at their best here, but Gibson, Law, and Neill are all reliably good and, most importantly, likable.

popcorninhell Attack Force Z; A movie saved from obscurity solely because it provided early rolls to Mel Gibson and Sam Neill. Throw parallels to The Guns of Navarone (1961), The Dirty Dozen (1967) and Where Eagles Dare (1968) and you got yourself an Australian knock-off of early tough-soldier- man American bravado.A group of Australian special forces is deployed during WWII to recover the passengers of a downed plane in Japanese occupied Dutch East Indies. There they kick the proverbial hornets nest and try to stay alive thanks to the help of an underground resistance movement.It was hard to get into this one largely due to its constant clichés. I guess I have seen the dramatic self-sacrifice of a noble comrade and stealth gone awry because a twig snapped way too many times. The characters themselves aren't incredibly developed and any attempt to flesh them out feels jerky and unnatural. At one point it just gets absurd as one character stays behind to protect the love interest he had shared a room with only a few cuts ago. Granted she prevented him from being discovered but besides a common enemy they had little to really bond over.Another major problem I had was the elongated scenes involving other languages like Japanese and Cantonese. Perhaps it was just the version I saw but with no subtitles provided, I was forced to guess what they were saying and only later confirm what was going on. Plus if I'm not mistaken, they speak Malay in Indonesia not Cantonese.

Euromutt "Attack Force Z" depicts a fictitious operation by a five-man team from Z Special Unit, a predominantly Australian special operations unit in World War II, who are assigned to infiltrate a Japanese-occupied island in (presumably) the Dutch East Indies to rescue the aircrew of a downed Allied aircraft. The team is plagued by recurring bad luck (which quickly alerts the Japanese to their presence) and by friction between the inexperienced team leader, Captain Paul Kelly (Gibson), and his more experienced but erratic subordinate, a Dutch lieutenant named Jan Veitch (Law), the team's most fluent Chinese speaker. When the team manages to enlist the aid of the local resistance, further friction develops between Kelly and the local cell leader, Lin Chan-Lang (Ko), who resents Kelly's holding back information about the plane's occupants. About halfway in, however, we do discover why Kelly is under strict orders to keep clam.For a (relatively) low-budget war movie, "Attack Force Z" is pretty good. The costumes and weapons are about as historically accurate as feasible, and the filming location--Taiwan--is convincing enough as an island at the other end of the South China Sea. Particularly enjoyable is the fact that Asian characters speak their respective languages on screen, rather than accented English. This, however, does lead me to the film's main problem, at least to me, which is that it's a mess ethnographically and consequently linguistically. Because it was shot in Taiwan with a mostly Taiwanese (or otherwise ethnically Chinese) cast, the island's population appears to be entirely ethnically Chinese without a single speaker of Malay (as it was then called) in evidence, the occasional pitji cap-wearing extra notwithstanding. This also results in the somewhat unlikely situation of Veitch being fluent in Chinese rather than Malay.Veitch is the most problematic character in the film. The original director, Phillip Noyce, left the project at least partly because he disagreed with the producers over the choice of John Phillip Law to play Veitch, and bluntly, he was right: Law simply doesn't pull off anything resembling a credible Dutchman. It's not entirely his fault, though, because the writer and producers don't seem to have ever so much as met a Dutch person, as is apparent from the fact that Veitch isn't even a Dutch name (insofar as I can make out, it's Scottish). Admittedly, I am myself Dutch and my paternal grandmother's family lived in the East Indies so this is a niggle that maybe affects me more than the typical viewer but it's emblematic of what's wrong with an otherwise perfectly enjoyable film. Enough so that I can almost overlook how all the team members manage to stay clean shaven despite not having time to shave.

iainidc A little-known World War 2 drama despite featuring the talents of Mel Gibson and Sam Neill. The film follows an Australian Special Forces team led by Gibson on a mission to rescue the occupants of a plane crash-landed on a Pacific Island. Naturally, the island is swarming with Japanese determined to thwart the mission at every turn.The film is not without its weaknesses; Gibson & Neill are a little flat thanks to a script that doesn't allow them to show off their talents to the full(compare to Gibson's brilliant performance as Frank Dunn in Gallipoli made around the same time). The music is poignant but fails to add much to the drama and there is a low-budget feel to much of the film in general.Having said that, Attack Force Z is fairly entertaining; it moves at a good pace and there are plenty of well-staged action sequences. The ending makes a strong statement on the futility of war. A decent addition to your war movie collection but for fans of the genre only.