731

2025 [CHINESE]

Action / Drama / History / Horror / Thriller / War

3
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Spilled 52% · 50 ratings
IMDb Rating 3.3/10 10 1624 1.6K

based on true story history conceited

Director

Linshan Zhao Photo
Linshan Zhao

Top cast

Karry Wang Photo
Karry Wang as
Irene Wan Photo
Irene Wan as Shinzo
Ziye Lin Photo
Ziye Lin as Sun Mingliang
Qian Sun Photo
Qian Sun as Lin Suxian
2160p.WEB.x265
5.6 GB
3840*1608
Chinese 5.1
NR
24 fps
2 hr 5 min
Seeds 23

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by HUIYUZ-3 2 / 10

Narrative Weakness and Historical Inaccuracy

The film suffers from an incoherent narrative and a disjointed fictional storyline. Rather than foregrounding the crimes against humanity perpetrated by Unit 731, it relies heavily on the director's own artistic constructions, thereby straying from historical accuracy. What should have been a powerful cinematic indictment of one of the darkest episodes of the twentieth century instead becomes a confused assemblage of loosely connected scenes that fail to provide historical clarity or moral weight. The absence of a clear and disciplined narrative arc undermines the film's capacity to engage audiences with the gravity of Unit 731's atrocities. Instead of confronting viewers with the systematic cruelty, medical experimentation, and crimes against humanity that defined the unit's legacy, the film becomes preoccupied with the director's personal aesthetic experiments and symbolic imagery. Such artistic diversions, while perhaps visually striking, ultimately trivialize the subject matter by reducing real historical suffering to abstract metaphor. This approach risks diminishing the educational and ethical potential of the film, as it neither communicates historical truth nor pays sufficient respect to the victims. By prioritizing fragmented artistic imagination over factual representation, the director inadvertently detaches the work from its necessary historical grounding, leaving audiences with confusion rather than comprehension, and aesthetic impressions rather than moral awareness. In this respect, the film not only fails as a historical reconstruction but also as a cinematic work of remembrance.
Reviewed by ethan-55991 3 / 10

The plots were really dispersed

Reviewed by Gmv200 3 / 10

Too light for such darkness: A missed duty of remembrance

Unit 731 was one of the most traumatic, barbaric, and inhuman events in history. There are no words strong enough to capture the gravity of what happened in those chambers of death.When you make a movie about Unit 731, you have a duty of remembrance. You have the duty to tell what happened, the obligation to mark us, and even to shock us by telling what happened in a raw way. The movie must carry this memory across generations, so that humanity will remember, so that history will never repeat itself.731 - Evil Unbound chose to water things down, filming with a light-hearted approach. Too light-hearted. The movie takes on a somewhat Squid Game-like style. The colour palette is far too bright to depict such a dark historical event: it should have used a darker, greyer palette, like in The Pianist or in the Japanese occupation section of Ip Man 1. The Japanese guards come across as goofy, which is disturbing considering the historical context.The movie feels too cheerful, when it should not be cheerful at all. It should not entertain us, it should horrify us. Squid Game is fiction, but Unit 731 really happened. The tortures really happened. The deaths really happened. The experiments on victims, vivisections, frostbite testing, exposures to toxic gases - all of that really happened. True, the movie briefly shows some of these tortures, but it fails to give them a central role in the movie, pushing them into the background. These scenes should have carried more psychological weight in order to mark the audience, because this is what we want to teach the audience, that these atrocities happened.It's a shame to choose such a direction for the movie, especially since it received international coverage (in France, the channel France24 even ran a short video about the movie's release). This was an opportunity to make the entire world aware of what happened at Unit 731, and in a way not to shadow the horrors of Imperial Japan during World War II.NB: For a powerful example of how to convey life in a camp, I recommend "If This Is a Man" by Primo Levi. Though it deals with German concentration camps rather than Unit 731, and is a book rather than a film, it shows how to reflect the atrocities of dehumanisation while leaving a lasting mark on the reader or audience. Its narration is compelling and immerses us in the prisoner's perspective.
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