Emperor (2012)

(In French, On TV, November 2020) As has often been observed, winning a war is one thing, but winning the peace is something else. Emperor starts once the WW2 hostilities between the United States and Japan have ended, but you can still feel the lingering tension of the war throughout the entire duration of the film, as the newly-occupying Americans wonder whether the emperor should be tried as a war criminal. The stakes are high—any false move could trigger insurrections and threaten the stability of the American occupation. While Tommy Lee Jones headlines the film as General Douglas MacArthur, the protagonist is played by Matthew Fox, as a younger man with very personal reasons to find the truth. Less of a war movie and more of a strategic whodunit trying to piece together the big decisions of the war after the fact, Emperor is also a story of cultural reconciliation, as the Americans try to manage a situation in a very different country. The suspense is in low keys, but it’s as real as anything else. American jingoism is kept to a minimum, and the result shines a welcome cinematic light on one of the codas of World War II and brings something new to the WW2 corpus.