“The Pacific Century” is most riveting when it weaves Asia’s past with its present. One of the best episodes, “The Two Coasts of China,” places the xenophobia of today’s Communists in the context of China’s ancient hostility toward the outside world. Gibney’s camera crew traveled to Mongolia and got scenes of native filmmakers re-creating Genghis Khan’s invasion of China, complete with hundreds of soldier-extras riding horseback across the steppes. To capture the era of the Opium War (when the British navy overwhelmed the Chinese to protect its contraband trade), he serves up details about “Miami Vice”-style smuggling trips, Indian opium factories and entrepreneurs such as Warren Delano, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s grandfather. Framing the old conflicts are modern images of capitalist Hong Kong-as threatening to today’s Communist regime as the British “barbarians” were to the Manchus.
Gibney does a terrific job exploring Japan’s history, showing how it grafted Western-style colonialism, culture and democracy to its own society. Beginning with the rise of the Emperor Meiji, he devotes four episodes to the country’s 130-year evolution from a nation of samurai to soldiers to salarymen. It’s jolting to realize that the Mitsubishi Corp. once ran Battleship Island, a 19th-century Alcatraz where coal miners lived packed into wretched “octopus dens” and faced execution if they tried to escape. Particularly touching are scenes from the occupation, in which Japan aped all things American: a patronizing American newsreel shows “a Jap jazz band for Joe and Mrs. Joe” and a Japanese Elvis attempts to sing “(You Ain’t Nothin’ But a) Hound Dog.” But footage of strikes and anti-American riots in 1960 explodes the common misconception that Japan’s transformation to economic superpower was smooth. In one moment from 1960 captured on videotape, a right-wing assassin rushes across a stage and thrusts a samurai sword into a socialist leader. It’s a chilling image of the violent, medieval forces still seething in the Japanese psyche.
Once it gets past Japan, however, “The Pacific Century” loses focus. (Gibney’s original plan was to make a documentary just on Japan, but the Annenberg/CPB Project, which chipped in $2.5 million of the $4.5 million budget, wanted him to tackle the whole Pacific Rim.) South Korea’s rapid modernization and pro-democracy uprisings are vividly portrayed, but his treatment of the Chinese Revolution is cursory and disorganized, and much of the material on Taiwan and Singapore is just plain dull. And while Peter Coyote’s fine, understated narration lends resonance, your eyes may glaze over when the documentary falls back on a battery of droning academics. It desperately needs a poet-raconteur such as “The Civil War’s” Shelby Foote.
A documentary this sprawling is also bound to be flawed by omissions. It doesn’t touch Thailand’s boom or Cambodia’s tragedy, skirts the Vietnam War and neglects Deng Xiaoping. A segment on the Philippines begs for more scenes from Cory Aquino’s 1986 revolution that toppled Ferdinand Marcos; an episode about Indonesian leader Sukarno (described by a comrade as “a combination of George Washington and Clark Gable”) inexplicably says nothing about the thousands of leftists murdered in the 1965 military coup-one of the darkest chapters of Asian history. And it could use more about the underside of the Japanese miracle-the stock-market scandals, the bursting of the real-estate bubble. But what’s striking are themes and, above all, images: a shabby crowd at a Tokyo fashion show in 1960, poised between memories of abject poverty and dreams of prosperity. And in a tacky video from the People’s Republic, a young woman sings: “Hurry up 1997/Then I can go to Hong Kong/ Come soon 1997/I want to have a wild time.” Moments like that one poignantly capture the yearnings of a region still new to affluence and democracy.
