Prisoners of the Sun (1990)

Bryan Brown portrays a military lawyer prosecuting the garrison of a Japanese POW camp where 800 Aussie soldiers were killed during World War Two. Of course the whole notion of a war crimes trial is totally ridiculous, but director Stephen Wallace ignores the built-in ambiguities of the post-war legal inquisition to offer, instead, a holy crusade against the enemies of freedom, with enough courtroom histrionics to make Perry Mason blush: emotional outbursts; surprise witnesses; flashback re-enactments and so forth. The script makes no attempt to understand the enemy: most of the Japanese are inscrutable monsters, led by George Takei, who gets star billing with a five-minute walk-on role, presumably to lure the unwary Trekkie into seeing the film. The other villains are (predictably) the American overlords, represented by Terry O'Quinn, wearing sinister Douglas Macarthur-style sunglasses and making ominous references to a New World Order. The film is based on a true story, but the subject of war crimes and punishment deserves a deeper, more substantial treatment than this handsome, high-minded piece of fluff.