Title:
Mission of the Shark: The Saga of the USS Indianapolis
Year: 1991
Nationality: American?
Starring: Stacy Keach, Richard Thomas, Steve Landesberg, Don Harvey, Richard Cicchihi, Dave Caruso and others
Directed by: Robert Iscove
Written by: Alan Sharp
Cinematography: James Pergola
Music: Craig Saffan
Budget: Unknown
Box Office: n/a; TV movie
Another movie based on true events, this film chronicles the sinking of the USS
Indianapolis in World War II and the desperate struggles of the survivors to stay alive long enough to be rescued from the sharks who circled in for the kill. A made-for-TV movie, it opens in 1960, with the 15th anniversary reunion of the survivors from the
Indianapolis and quickly fades to the recollections of Captain McVeigh. It's 1945 and the
Indianapolis, bound for the island of Guam, is carrying some secret cargo which nobody is allowed to know the nature of, but seems important to the war effort. Even McVeigh will not confirm whether or not he is aware of what he's carrying, however his overconfidence as to pursuit by Japanese submarines is his undoing, as he is currently being stalked by one. Due to his contention that to follow the usual evasive pattern expected by navy ships would be useless in the light of the new weapon the enemy have placed into the arena – suicide manned torpedoes – the ship is easily tracked and on its way back from its mission, having delivered the mysterious cargo it is attacked and sunk by a Japanese sub. We do get to see the cargo being loaded aboard the
Enola Gay, so if there was any doubt as to what they were transporting, well that doubt has now been removed.
Iniitally unwilling to abandon ship (the stories of what happens in Japanese POW camps no doubt screaming in his mind) Captain McVeigh does his best to keep the ship afloat, hoping they may be able to limp to the nearest base for repairs, but his efforts prove fruitless and the surviving sailors find themselves drifting in the middle of the Pacific Ocean as the ship goes down. One of the last to jump, McVeigh at first believes he is the only survivor, as his calls are not answered, but eventually he meets up with another sailor who manages to swim to his dingy and they begin the mammoth task of searching for others who may have made it off the ship.
After some time they come across another dingy, this one containing the priest who had joined them at Guam, and about ten men; a quick redistribution of resources makes the men feel a little safer, if not much. Suddenly a shark approaches, but it's quite small and one of the sailors scares it off with a shot from his pistol. Night falls, and as the officers realise there are too many men for the two small boats they order those who are not injured into the water, to give up their places for the men who are wounded. The next morning the shark is back, and it's brought its buddies. The sharks immediately attack the helpless sailors, and some are wounded. Dead bodies are cast overboard to try to appease the animals, but the sharks prefer live meat.
In another part of the ocean, a larger group of seamen are faring much worse, having no liferafts at all, and all bobbing in the water. Some are dying of their wounds as Lieutenant Scott (Richard Thomas, John Boy from
The Waltons), the ship's medic, tries to hold the group together. Discipline begins to break down as the men realise they may die out here, and suddenly orders are not treated as they were when they were onboard ship. One sailor, Kinderman, takes it too far and, struggling with a marine who demands he give up his raft in favour of wounded men, drowns him. Shocked and horrified, and wishing to put as much distance as they can between them and him – literally as well as figuratively – the other men on the raft desert him, leaving him alone.
When the shark returns (I assume it's the same one, could be another I guess) it goes this time directly for the dingy, puncturing the thing and sending men spilling into the water, some of whom it snaps at. Red fluid leaks out across the water. A patrol aircraft finally spots the men in the water, and coming in as low as they can the crew throw out what supplies they have on board, radio the position of the men to base, and the fact that the Indianapolis cannot be confirmed as arriving at her destination begins to ring alarm bells. The captain of the patrol plane, which luckily happens to be a flying boat, decides to put down on the ocean near the sailors.
Paranoia fuelled by fear and the fact that many of the men have been, against explicit orders, drinking salt water, leads some to believe that this is a Japanese trap. Kinderman falls prey to their madness, being knifed by one of the sailors in the mistaken belief that he is a “Jap”, and so he joins his murder victim in the marine's watery grave. With survivors (from only one group; there are groups spread out across the section of ocean and there's no way one plane can get to them all) taken aboard the patrol plane, confirmation is received that they are from the Indianapolis, and that she has been sunk. Soon after a destroyer arrives and takes the men to safety, but the priest has already fallen victim to the shark and is dead when the captain, thinking he's sleeping, excitedly wakes him and points at the approaching ship, only to find the water around him dark red and the priest slipping below the waves.
Later there is a court-martial, in which Captain McVeigh is accused of failing to order the evacuation of the ship in a timely enough manner to assure the chances of survival for as many of the crew as possible, and refusing to follow a zig-zag course to throw off enemy submarines. In a shock move, the prosecution calls the captain of the Japanese sub that sank the Indianapolis (the war now being over, Japan having surrendered after the atomic bomb, part of which the
Indianapolis had been carrying to Guam, was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki). It's a bold move, a controversial and very unpopular one, and yet proves to be the ace up the prosecution's sleeve. McVeigh is cleared of the charge of not ordering the abandonment of the ship in time but found guilty of endangering his command by refusing to implement the standard zig-zag manoeuevre. The conviction, having served its purpose by allowing the top brass at the Navy to avoid blame and shift responsibility to the shoulders of their scapegoat, is rescinded son after the trial, but though he returns to active duty, McVeigh cannot live with his own personal guilt and takes his own life twenty years later.
Quotes
Sailor: “I heard we're carrying 5000 rolls of Senate toilet paper for General Douglas MacArthur: seems he's getting tired of using his orders to wipe his butt on!”
: “Some of the men have speculated that Betty Grable is living in that box down belowdecks.”
McVeigh: “That's absolutely untrue. Miss Grable is in my quarters.”
Questions?
At the end, when the verdict is passed, McVeigh's wife fumes “They never court-martialled any other captain who lost his ship in the war! They're using you as a scapegoat to cover their own mistakes.” True, they definitely are, but what mistakes specfically? The idea of not reporting a combatant ship on arrival was a definite contributing factor to the lack of response to the loss of the
Indianapolis, so it could be that. Or is it the mere fact that they left the survivors in the sea for five days before they were rescued? It's not really made clear exactly what the Navy are covering up here.
McVeigh says he has to see the captain of the Japanese sub that sunk the
Indianapolis, but when they're alone, it's very stilted and uncomfortable, and nothing really gets said of any consequence. I assumed they were going to talk about chidren, or the war, or the way men are forced to do terrible things, or that the war is over now and they are no longer enemies. But no. Basically nothing, So why was McVeigh so desperate to see his ex-enemy?
Verdict: There's little point in going through my usual sections here, as it became clear about halfway through the movie that though it's titled
Mission of the Shark, and sharks are in it, it's not really in any way a shark movie. It's more a film lauding the power of the human spirit, the ever-present hope and the determination not to surrender to his fate that keeps man going, and that's great and very commendable, but as a shark movie this blows big time. The sharks are glimpsed but rarely, they have very little real interaction with the crew and we're not even told what type they are, though they're certainly too small to be Great Whites. It's essentially a war movie with some sharks added in.
True, it is based on an actual experience, an occurrence that befell the men who served on the USS
Indianapolis, but even a documentary I watched on this went more into the effect the sharks had on the men. Here, it's almost incidental, and there's really nothing for the shark aficionado.
So in the end all I can award it is the lowest shark rating I have, which is
tl;dr
Needed more sharks.