Rising Sun (1993)

Rising Sun arrives from 1993, a year when a studio could still build a thriller around a trade imbalance and expect a paying audience. Michael Crichton's novel about Japanese capital sinking its teeth into Los Angeles is trimmed to two hours, and the result is a murder investigation that keeps pausing to explain corporate structure to a homicide detective. Philip Kaufman cast Wesley Snipes as the co-lead, a role written as Caucasian, a change Crichton publicly disliked on the grounds that it introduced a second racial tension into a film already about one. That reads as representation by accident, not by design, and it did not spare the production from organized protest by Asian-American groups who found its portrait of Japanese business conduct hostile. A substantial Asian and Asian-American ensemble is present. The film is not thoughtful about any of it.

The villainy is corporate. A semiconductor merger, a doctored surveillance disc, a senator compromised by footage: the cover-up runs on institutional self-interest, and the picture is content to let an American lawyer take the fall so the keiretsu can close its deal. This is anti-corporate sentiment of a sturdy, pre-millennial variety, aimed at specific boardrooms. Sean Connery, who also produced, spends much of the running time lecturing on Japanese etiquette, honor, and the mechanics of doing business in Tokyo. The film stops dead for these seminars. They are the closest thing to sermonizing on offer, and the sermon concerns trade policy.

Everything else is missing. There is a female computer expert, and she is competent, and the film has no further interest in her or in whatever produced her. No queer characters. No environmental dread. No body politics. No neurodivergent reading of anyone's conduct. No rewriting of the historical record. The remainder is a muddled thriller that mistakes cultural friction for insight and exposition for drama, and it was reviewed accordingly.