Quick Review #71: Chinmoku no kantai Season 1 Tokyowan Daikaisen (Drama) - Winter 2024

Title: Chinmoku no kantai Season 1 Tokyowan Daikaisen / 沈黙の艦隊　シーズン１東京湾大海戦

Rating: 8 / 10

Recommended for: 

Those who are interested in military-themed stories and are fans of the cast especially Oosawa Takao and Tamaki Hiroshi

NOTE: The drama version is said to contain scenes from the movie version + unreleased scenes from the movie + the aftermath of the movie so even if you haven't watched the movie, it wouldn't be an issue. However, the story is still far from finished so there should be a Season 2 to tie up all the loose ends.

Liked:

- The scale of this production was definitely not something you could get from the private networks and not achievable by using CG only. Especially the battle scenes and those featuring the submarines, they would not have been possible without the support of the Ministry of Defence and Self Defense Forces in Japan plus the big budget from Amazon Studio since this was the first Japanese movie production they were involved in.

- The drama had a star-studded cast but the highlight was definitely Oosawa Takao who was not only the lead but also co-producer. He was instrumental in carrying the whole story as the lead character Kaeida who was a charismatic captain but also looked somewhat sinister at times because his motives and thoughts were hard to guess and understand. On the other hand, Tamaki Hiroshi provided a good contrast against Oosawa with his portrayal of Fukamachi who had a different leadership style that could come across as too idealistic at times but he still admired Kaieda, his former superior at the same time for the latter's decisiveness in making difficult decisions.

- The story offered some controversial and serious issues which deserved a lot of thought especially in this era of not so peaceful times but these would not have been touched on if not for the fact that this was on an international streaming platform. While the concepts thrown up may alienate people and can come across as divisive and nationalistic given the setting of the story, it might be worth watching this to develop your own opinions since the story tried to offer multiple perspectives rather than drive a single conclusion.

Disliked: 

- As someone who is not familiar with military-themed stories or the military in general, the story was a bit confusing at first. To begin with, the numerous titles, how military fleets operate, the chain of command in the military as well as how the weapons/ships/submarines work are not so easy to understand. For those who are in the know, they might enjoy this story a lot more than a layman like me. And it also doesn't help that the English translations on screen flashed by too quickly and I often had to rewind to read these titles especially in the earlier stages of this drama.

- This has got to do with the post-production quality of this drama. Subtitles are meant not just for people who don't speak the language featured in the production but also those who may have hearing issues so that they can still "read" the dialogue and enjoy the work. The problem is, for the English subtitles, they do not appear when English was spoken while for the Japanese subtitles, they appeared regardless of whether English or Japanese was spoken in the drama. It would have been better if the subtitles appeared all the time regardless of the spoken language for the sake of consistency. Even as a native speaker of English, I found that the American English spoken in this drama can be difficult to hear because the audio was somewhat muffled at times and the accent can be an issue as well. And most importantly, the English subtitles' quality on Amazon Prime seems to be a bit lacking with grammar and spelling mistakes here and there. Makes me wonder if proper QC was done because I noticed similar issues with their English subtitles on other Amazon Prime shows as well.

- Since this is a military-themed drama, it is probably not surprising that the ladies tend to have a very small role in the whole scheme of things since the military is a male-dominated world. The contrast was even more evident because on Japan's side, the women held relatively important roles as the Minister of Defence, the vice captain of a submarine and the secretary for the Secretary General of the Cabinet who also worked as the interpreter between the Japanese Prime Minister and US President. On the US side though, there was hardly any female figure which stood out. While it would have been ideal to have more female participation on both sides, I guess this was something which couldn't be helped given the theme of this story.