The Silent Service (2023) User Reviews

Slow and determined, not for impatient viewers

[msghall · 7/10 · 1 March 2024]

Forget the 1 star jingoistic reviews of this Japanese production. Yes, it moves slowly and deliberately. Yes, the details about uniforms etc may not be as exact as some viewers may demand. But for me the story is the thing.

The big bonus is Takao Osawa, the smiling buddha general of the Kingdom series of movies. His calm but decisive nature provides the bedrock of this series.

And yes, it could have been more disciplined in its editing but that's nothing new for streaming movies and TV shows these days. A little bit of patience pays off here big time. Stick with it. The rewards, while not spectacular, are worth it.

Entertaining, but with weaknesses

[okpilak · 7/10 · 10 February 2024]

It is interesting as it pits the US against Japan. Japanese Captain Kaieda is brilliant in navigation and tactics and has managed to steal a top secret US-Japanese nuclear submarine, the Sea Bat, and has declared he is the leader of the independent nation of Yamato. That raises concerns for Japan, and also irritates the Americans. The 7th Fleet is mobilized to track down the submarine. A Japanese Captain, Kukamachi is sent to intercept the Sea Bat in a diesel powered submarine. It becomes an interesting game of cat and mouse, and Kaieda uses some very interesting tactics. Episode 5 is perhaps the most important and also shows the flaws in the series. The US considers Kaieda a terrorist, and naturally America never negotiates with a terrorist. So the Sea Bat is to be hunted down and destroyed, which is not what Japan wants to happen, and this results in a rift, and also Presidential testosterone is on display, and the US comes across as a bully. As part of the effort to track down and destroy the Sea Bat, the 3rd fleet also joins forces and the Sea Bat easily sinks one of the US nuclear carriers. The CGI isn't terrible, but they have both US carriers identical, down to the arrangement of aircraft on the decks. That seems sloppy. Also, as they follow ships and submarines by sonar, the sonar scope shows identifications of the ships like would be seen on air control radar at an airport. That seems unlikely. It seems to be set up for another season.

It seems impossible to pay to make something this bad

[georgestephenson-57026 · 1/10 · 1 March 2024]

Wrong USN/JMSDF uniforms, wrong shirts, wrong insignia, wrong hair length, wrong rank structure, far too many women in positions of power, disrespectful JMSDF enlisted personnel, wrong submarine, wrong plot, wrong writing, wrong physics, wrong drydock, wrong, wrong.

There are fine Japanese and American actors - fine producers - fine set builders and costume professionals - why were none of them hired for this disaster? Where was the technical advisor - wait - there is no way there was a technical advisor.

How is this production of wrong even possible.

Never allow any of these people to work in entertainment - ever again!

Crap Jingoistic waste of time

[perseus71 · 1/10 · 10 February 2024]

Based on an antique manga, this drivel from Amazon is a big waste of time.

Given the budget they had a great opportunity to produce something on the scale of "Hunt for Red October" meets "Tora Tora Tora". Instead what we have is daytime soap with enough dull dialogue to put an elephant to sleep. Besides protagonist and the antagonist are shown as superhuman all knowing people who get all the right coincidences as they need.

The action scene, if you call them that; are a snooze fest and demonstrate a clear lack of military knowledge and tactical understanding on part of the director.

Overall I'd give zero rating if I could.

Good Grief - My Prime Subscription paid for this rubbish!?

[bob-392-417066 · 1/10 · 17 March 2024]

There's only one thing more stupid than the people who made this heap of rubbish - and that's me for a) paying Amazon in the first place and b) hoping that it might get better after the first episode!

I tried, I really tried but I was admittedly just too thick to stop watching it after the first US Admiral disobeyed a direct order and failed miserably to put a missile straight down the conning tower of the sub. But the fact that he wasn't immediately court marshalled just goes to show how far away from reality the producers really were.

The US Navy is unable to stop one submarine and then cannot hold its own personnel to account - who are they trying to kid? What's worse is that the same admiral then hums and haws his way through the later conflict and, once again, fails miserably.

The whole thing just falls down on just about every single technical fact, military tactic, political debate and is, basically, just like its main character - insane! But not as nuts as I was for watching it....

Solid acting, decent special effects, but laughable and awful

[kcalbertina59 · 3/10 · 17 April 2024]

First off, there are spoilers. Second, the disclaimer...I couldn't make it through the entire season. It was just that bad. I really, really wanted to like this. It's right in my wheelhouse as far as genres.

Let's start with the good, because there isn't a lot. The Japanese actors do a very good job and are quite believable in their roles, especially Kaieda and Fukamachi played by Takao Ohsawa and Hiroshi Tamaki respectively. Additionally, I would say that the opening scenes draw you in. The special effects are solid as well. But that's where the good ends and bad (and sometimes absurd) begins.

And the bad...where do we start? The characters of the American leadership are just awful stereotypes. How bad? They're so be that they couldn't even be called characters, they're actually charactictures. I actually had to check to see if this was intended to be a farce rather than a drama.

Second, we get to the suppositions of the maiden voyage. First, we are told the Sea Bat (the suoer submarine) was intended for the Japanese to use. Okay, maybe??? It's hard to believe that the United States would build the most technologically advance warship in existence and then give it to another country instead of using it, but I'll give that a pass.

However, we are also supposed to believe the following. 1) The Japanese crew would make the final check themselves without any American supervision; 2) The US would not even monitor this enough to know if a nuclear warhead was loaded; 3) The US would not even know if a nuclear warhead might be missing; 4) The whole US Naval hierarchy would not know the capabilities of the submarine and additionally 5) Not call in the designers or developers of the submarine and its technology to brief them once the Japanese commander's intentions are known; 6) That US cabinet meetings on the matter would be reduced to a conversation that would be below 1st grade level. Any of these would be laughable and a reason to totally dismiss the story. All of them together is just a total insult to the intelligence of the viewer.

I also found the naming of the submarine "country" the Yamato to be hilarious. So a commander who thinks he is leading the world to pacificism uses the name of a WWII battleship, the very symbol of the WWII Japanese war machine and imperialism, as the name of his "peaceful" country. Yeah, that makes a whole lot of sense. And even funnier, the American president had no idea what the significance of Yamato was in history and it had to be explained to him.

Then we have the idiotic temper-tantrum thrown by a member of the US naval hierarchy, the sanctimonious cabinet meetings by the Japanese, the ineptitude of the United States Navy...quite frankly, it made the series so bad, I couldn't stay with it to the very end.

Unfortunately, this is the kind of political agenda influenced garbage that has now become commonplace on Amazon Prime and Netflix. They place their agenda above solid entertainment, entertainment that I'm paying for with my overpriced dues. This series almost singlehandedly caused me to cancel my prime subscription. They keep jacking up the price so they can produce this dung heap.

My advice to viewers, don't.

Bad Writing

[jeffplass · 1/10 · 17 March 2024]

Terrible on technical accuracy. It seems all US naval personnel either question their orders or simply ignore them - without consequence. Apparently this is well tolerated in the navy. The US navy is portrayed as blundering and ineffective. The story has potential but it's just too difficult to get past the flaws. The stolen sub navigates through shipwrecks as if it were magic, while US submarines fumble around and crash into things. Japanese government officials continue to say that war must be avoided at all cost, but act just the opposite - including sending their fleet to defend the stolen submarine.

Boring as Hell

[inquisidordehierro · 1/10 · 18 February 2024]

This is one of the worst series I have seen lately. It could have been the perfect opportunity to make a series about modern warfare at sea but they have clearly chosen a writer who has never seen a submarine in his life (for the series, the original manga was fine). Not content with spoiling the few action scenes there are with their ignorance of modern submarine warfare, the plot makes no sense. And things get worse chapter after chapter.

The dialogues are boring to the extreme. Japanese actors are as good at acting as a rock and Westerners seem to want to beat them at it.

This result is very sad because the manga on which the series is based is quite interesting.

Nice but unrealistic

[phamdoanh-12035 · 2 May 2024]

One submarine with maybe but only maybe nuclear weapons on board stands off with 2 us fleets including 2 aircraft carriers, one of which is sunk by torpedo and the other also nearly sunk, and the us navy retreats without launching a single aircraft, how realistic is that?

The plot in involves a Japanese general commanding a us submarine and using it to blackmail the us and Japanese governments into a peace agreement by threatening with deploying the nuclear missiles on board, while both governments still guessing whether the submarine nuclear weapons has at all. The renegade submarine was chased 8 episodes long but nobody think about informing the families of the crew, how realistic is that too?