Inspirational stories are hard to come by in the history of the Pacific War, but Japanese filmmakers keep looking for them. “Yukikaze,” by first-time feature director Toshihisa Yamada, recounts the tale of an Imperial Japanese Navy destroyer that survived so many battles, it came to be known as the “lucky ship.”

This fabled vessel has also been valorized in a ghastly 1964 Shochiku film, “Destroyer Yukikaze,” starring comic actor Isamu Nagato, and played a crucial (if perhaps ahistorical) role in Takashi Yamazaki’s “Godzilla Minus One” (2023). Yamada’s movie has little in common with the former, save for the fact that both were produced with the cooperation of Japan’s Defense Ministry and shy away from the ugly realities of combat.

“Yukikaze” gets off to a bracing start with a scene of bloodied bodies strewn around a Japanese ship during the Battle of Midway in 1942. However, this is a film that treats war mostly as an abstraction, plotted out on campaign maps and discussed in staid meetings among the navy’s top brass. Battle scenes are confined mostly to the ship’s bridge, interspersed with repetitive shots of gunners blasting away at oncoming aircraft.