I read the book before watching this film. There seemed to be a lot of scenes in the film which weren't in the book. I've tried reading some reviews here to work out what I missed, but nobody mentioned this at all, which seems odd since the film was so melodramatic compared to the book.
Anyway, for various reasons, especially the scenes which didn't appear in the book, I didn't like the film at all.
A detail: I would have thought that where the book referred to hitting people with bamboo sticks, the sticks it was referring to were kendo practice swords, known as shinai, rather than solid pieces of bamboo depicted in the film. It would be quite hard to beat someone with a solid piece of bamboo, and likely to hurt the person hitting almost as much as the person being hit.
Incidentally, this book is one of very many books written by survivors of Japanese imprisonment, many self-published, of which a list is published by the society called the Children of the Far East Prisoners of War.
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