Roots Search: Shokushin buttai X

I first watched Root Search at a Sci Fi convention in the late 80s, I was already an anime aficionado, and had many titles watched as well as in my library. I thought it was basically trash and slept through most of it. Years later in 1997, im in a theatre, watching a pretty good horror movie when it strikes me. I've seen some of this before. I can't place it and it gnaws at me. A few months after that, a friend asks if I've ever seen an older anime called 'Root Search' I denigrate it as not worthwhile, and she says I should take another look. So I do, I rent it and watch and suddenly, I understand what my brain was linking. Also, rewatching the show definitely has different meanings to you when you actually pay attention and have some history in your own life. Aside from the obvious connection to that previously mentioned horror movie which is sometimes labeled as either Hellraiser(1987) in space or simply as 'a haunted house in space' - Event Horizon (1997). Root Search stands on its own as some heavy sci fi that should be enjoyed. Don't expect an amazing movie, it's not that. It's a thought experiment on screen. A brain tickling gut punching experience if you understand the implications. I don't highly recommend this, however, if you are a fan of anime, horror, sci fi, and like the movie Event Horizon, then I do highly recommend you watch this just once. Enjoy.

Painful is the best way to describe watching this. Everything from the bad character designs to the incoherent script to the incompetent directing makes this one of the absolute worst anime I've ever seen. 4 scientists on a space station (the whole station is huge, yet has only 4 staff members? Huh?) find a spacecraft where all but one of the crew members has been killed. They also find an alien on board. Do you think the alien killed them? Thankfully, at least ONE of these 4 is smart enough to realize "Hey, we should get rid of this thing" and they fire it off into space (so it can kill other people later, I guess). Well, guess what? Part of this alien is still on the ship and starts killing them with horrors from their past as some lame excuse. Throw in some ridiculous love thing between the only female character and the survivor from the spacecraft (along with a nice trippy sequence involving them getting naked while the alien is chasing them) and some nonsense about it being a "messenger of God" and a totally pointless, vague ending and you have a bad, bad way to spend 45 minutes of your life (unless you enjoy doing the "Mystery Science Theater 3000" thing yourself, in which case this is ripe for plunder). Oh, did I mention the pointless dialog where she starts going on about "why God created us" for no reason? Get me out of here! The ONLY good thing is that it was subtitled, but even that wasn't much help.

I do love a lot of anime, but I really hated Roots Search. The voice cast do an okay enough job with what they got, which is not much admittedly, but they aren't enough to save the movie especially when everything else fails abysmally. The animation is pretty much awful, the backgrounds are static, the colours are flat and the designs of the characters are downright ugly and bizarre. The music also feels like it belongs in a different movie and feels dated, the dialogue is inane, the pacing is glacial and plodding and the plot is incomprehensible with phony philosophising and an inconclusive ending that makes you think that's it? The characters are also underdeveloped and difficult to emphasise with. In conclusion, a really awful film with next to no redeeming qualities. 1/10 Bethany Cox

Roots Search really goes off the rails in the final 10 or so minutes, like it really had no idea how to end. Even before that point, I kind of get why this has its detractors (even though it's niche, and probably only attracts the kinds of people who are into old-school anime), because before it goes off the deep end, nothing about it feels particularly original or creative. But it's only 45 minutes long and delivers on having some weird sci-fi/horror stuff, undoubtedly wearing its influences on its sleeve, but that stuff didn't bother me too much. I'd be willing to call it genuinely underrated if it didn't just run out of steam at a point and effectively give up before abruptly rolling credits, but it's hard to get too mad at something when it doesn't waste much of your time in the first place. If it had delivered an ending like that after a runtime that exceeded 90 minutes, it would probably be a different story.

This movie was my first introduction into the non-cute side of anime. Previous to that, I thought all anime was stuff like "Urusei Yatsura" and "Ranma." A lot of people have called this a bad "Alien" knock-off, but you know what? That's not such a bad thing to be. Besides, how can you basically tell the story well when you're limited to 45 minutes? If anything, if the producers were to make this a longer feature, it would definitely help.

I also found the "God-as-avenging-angel" aspect to be interesting, and I really wish they had gone into that angle more, but again, when you're limited to less than an hour, some things just have to go by the wayside.

I also would have liked to find out more about the private sins each character was hiding. We only had a vague idea in some cases (the station commander betrayed a friend, Norman left his friend behind to be eaten by some galactic space slug, etc.), but a little more information wouldn't hurt--especially when they didn't even go into why the creature spared Buzz.

Even so, with all its flaws, "Roots Search" is at worst an average anime feature, certainly not the "Ishtar" of anime that people make it out to be. There are live-action films with longer running times with even less thoughtfulness.