I went from cautiously liking this film in the first 40 minutes to despising it in the last hour or so. The schmaltzy sentimentality accumulates and creeps up on you, until towards the end you feel overdosed on insincerity to the point of nausea. The emotion portrayed is utterly hollow and manipulative in its dishonesty. By apparently trying to copy/compete with Hollywood at its most disingenuous, this film surpasses the worst of Hollywood hypocrisy. <br /><br />There is plenty of style in the technical aspects of the film-making, but for all the "realistic" computer graphics recreating the city of Tokyo in 1958, no amount of vacuous slickness can give any honesty, reality or authenticity to the people and situations. The empty "rebirth symbolism" of the construction of the tower is an appropriate reflection of the empty film itself; is the film's soullessness symptomatic of the soullessness of the country's "rebirth" since the destruction of 60 years ago?