Christensen Talks Beast Of Bataan

Exclusive: Vader on his WWII movie

Christensen Talks Beast Of Bataan

by Olly Richards |
Published on

Most of America is currently eating their own weight in turkey and trying not to kill their relations, so it's a little quiet on the news front (not to be confused with the western front, which is in the other direction). However, we bring you an update on Hayden Christensen's next film Beast of Bataan.

The World War II movie, directed by Fred Schepisi and co-starring Willem Defoe and William Hurt, tells the true story of the trial of Masaharu Homma, a Japanese general implicated in the Bataan Death March, in which around 100,000 American and Filipino prisoners of war were marched by Japanese soldiers to prison camps and violently mistreated along the way. Christensen will play Homma's lawyer and filled us in on a few more details about the movie.

"It's essentially a courtroom drama," he says. "It’s a very powerful story. It comments on how war is wrong and there is no right side and it’s all sort of fucked up...I play an American solider coming back from the war who is assigned to defend this Japanese general simply because he studied law before he went into service. The Americans are trying to set him up for the fall. My character becomes aware of that and really does his best to get him off the hook. Because of the corruptness of war, it doesn’t really work out for him...It felt like a good way of commenting on what is going on around the world without actually saying what is going on around the world.”

This sounds like the toughest role in Christensen's career so far and one that should, if he pulls it off, give him an answer to those who base the level of his acting talent on his performance in the Star Wars movies. We maintain that Christensen is an actor of considerable ability, who just hasn't picked the best scripts. He's a master of understatement in Shattered Glass. We're very interested to see him tackle something of this level.

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