Yamato

Yamato is a Japanese war film set around the crew of the battleship Yamato, the largest warship ever built for the Imperial Japanese Navy. In the present day, a young woman named Makiko Uchida travels to a southern Japanese port hoping to find someone who will take her to the site where the ship went down sixty years earlier. The veteran sailor Katsumi Kamio agrees to help her, and through his memories the story moves back to the 1940s, following a young recruit named Kamio as he is trained as a gunner aboard the Yamato and forms close bonds with his shipmates as the war turns against Japan. In 1945 the vessel is sent on a mission toward Okinawa with no expectation of returning.

Junya Satō directed and wrote the screenplay, adapting a book by Jun Henmi. The film was released in December 2005, and came after The Peking Man (1997) in Satō's filmography; he directed six films before it, beginning with The Private Police in 1969. The cast includes Takashi Sorimachi, Shido Nakamura, Yu Aoi, Noboru Takachi, Junichi Haruta and Ryô Hashizume. Produced by Toei Company and KADOKAWA, it took about 39 million dollars worldwide.

On IMDb the film holds a rating of 6.5 from roughly 2,600 votes, while on TMDB it stands at 5.4 from a much smaller number of votes, indicating a modest level of engagement outside Japan and middling audience appreciation.