Some random thoughts:
* always good to rewatch but it's never as good as you want it to be
* great opening with the foreword and troops climbing out of the sub and canoeing to the island
* action sequences are perfunctory rather than well done and I really wish Phil Noyce had done it instead of Tim Burstall - Burstall was excellent on casting and story choices but Noyce was the better director
* the cast are extremely good and deliver strong performances - Mel Gibson does well in a relatively thankless role (his one thing is being bullied into letting the Japanese diplomat live by that diplomat), but he definitely feels very Z Force
* the ending rips off The Wild Geese and is a needless bummer - the whole ending has fashionable 70s nihilism with pretty much all the goodies dead for absolutely no reason which actually is kind of more true of the typical Z Special Unit mission (those were the locals didn't betray them) but makes you feel depressed watching it and might be responsible for the film underperforming at the box office
* disappointingly little is made of Jon Phillip Law being Dutch - a great idea (could have explored the colonial issues etc), thrown away
* it's really distracting that everyone is Chinese when it should be Malaya/Indonesia/New Guinea - they just should have said "island off the coast of Taiwan"
* best role: Sam Neill - the ruthless operative who shoots John Waters but who then points out the locals will be killed if they rise up
* the Japanese are really stupid for believing that kid
* there's a lack of pace and energy - too much ambling when they get on the island when it should be fast paced
* production values are very good.
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