Casshern

If I hadn't already seen Zhang Yimou's Hero the previous week, I would have had to say that Casshern is one of the most beautiful-looking films I've seen in years (or ever). However, it'll have to suffice with second place. The CGI is highly stylised, with some green-screen shots looking purposefully false, but the real joy is in the production design - very evocative of Metropolis. Visual references are also made to the Nuremburg rallies of the 1930s, the Holocaust, Orwell's 1984 and those retro wind-up robots. A massive twenty-storey building is suspended in the air by hundreds of propellers like some overgrown zeppelin, and there's shots of a train so wide it requires five strips of rail side-by-side to accommodate it. The battle scenes are particularly awesome, and the combat scenes between Casshern and the Neo-Sapiens equally sharp.

However, the story primarily revolves around the drama of two families and there's very little affinity made with the main characters. Perhaps it was because the action scenes were so bombastic, but I found it very difficult to spur my interest in the character-driven moments, and this consequently made the two-and-a-half-hour running time feel a tad too long.

The final closing message, which runs contrary to the adrenalized mid-section of the film, is presented rather clumsily. But in true Japan-fashion, you can't help but be charmed by the sincerity of the whole thing.

This movie grabs you right from the beginning with its audio/visual bombardment that keeps your eyes and ears at maximum capacity. This doesn't last all the way through, there's interspersed moments of artistic pause. Those frozen moment scenes looked like a master's canvas come to motion, if not life. Don't blink.

The plot of the movie revolves around a battle of life and death, with the love story subplot on the main character. As many scripts set in Japan do, they revolve the drama around "honor" and whatever twisted concept the characters have of it. Often "honor" demands that everyone dies. A lot of people die, but the violence is pretty good, more conceptual than graphic, and it delivers its intended impact well. But it eventually gets over the top, and you start wondering if anyone is going to live.

There's more than a few plot-holes, and they are big enough to drive a Honda through. You get the idea they shot reels of film and thought about how to piece it together afterward. People do things for impossible reasons, and unlikely motivations (twisted sense of honor becomes a generic excuse). To their credit, with such a twisted plot piecing together scenes, they don't make the mistake of turning the plot on a dime anywhere, so you won't get lost. You know who the bad guys are (3 different groups!) and who the good guys are (the hero, his immediate family, and all innocents), and you know who it's going to come down to in the end.

To anyone who watches this with subtitles, blame the incoherent reasons behind character's actions on bad subtitle translations.... and it becomes a better than average movie, even good. Turn out the lights and crank the volume. Sci-Fi fans, this is a don't miss.

The good: Very beautiful scenes.

The bad: The movie was about 40 minutes too long, with repetitive flashbacks, scenes unnecessarily drawn out even after the dialogue and action has ended, a meandering plot (with plenty of plot holes), characters that act inconsistently or unbelievably, a forgettable soundtrack, and one -awesome- action scene/battle roughly around the 15% mark that makes you think the rest of the movie will feature scenes just as great, but it's just one long anti-climax after that point.

It also asks many naive questions about war/mankind/humanity to make a pretense at being remotely philosophical. It doesn't discuss what possible answers there could be to those questions, but it takes a mediocre movie and supposedly makes it 'deep.' Strangely enough, it seems that it's this very aspect of the movie that resonated with females (alongside the great visuals), who uniformly gave this movie high ratings.

This movie is barely a 6, for me.

I saw "Casshern" yesterday at a packed theater and I was blown away. I went in looking for a black-and-white head-busting superhero flick, but I got a lot more than I bargained for.

First off, the photography is gorgeous--as director, cinematographer, and editor Kazuaki Kiriya makes excellent use of color and grain in his film. At times it's a fuzzy, glowing dream, while at others it's stark, black-and-white sandpaper on your brain. It's an ingenious device to change the mood of the film instantaneously.

There are hints of any number of films here--Metropolis, Frankenstein, Mononoke Hime, Terminator, Tetsuo--and yet the film definitely stands on its own. By no means a slavish adaption of the original animated series, it does contain a number of nods to elements of the original that fans will surely recognize (I leave it to other viewers to catch these for themselves). I was particularly impressed by the first appearance of Luna, who looks like she stepped out of a painting by Tatsunoko alumnus Yoshitaka Amano in that scene.

The action scenes are backed by a driving rock score which reminded me of "The Crow" for some reason. Hardcore action fans who are hoping for a "Matrix Reloaded" bumper-to-bumper slugfest will be sorely disappointed, though. The fight scenes actually run counter to the message of the film--that, as one character states, "War makes humans inhuman." There is a long tradition in Japanese fiction--and animation, in particular--of the hero becoming what he hates to triumph over his enemy. The perfect example of this is Devilman, who becomes a demon to do battle with other demons. There is also a saying in Japan, "kokoro wo oni ni suru" or "steel your heart with resolve," and "Casshern" proves that some decisions will indeed set us on the road to having the hardened heart of a demon. In the end, most conflicts can never be won--even if you win, you lose, as you have more than likely sown the seeds for the next conflict.

I have no idea how foreign audiences will take to the message in this film, but I could hear a number of people crying in the darkness around me, and the crowd was uncharacteristically silent as they left the theater. As a translator, I hope this gets the treatment it deserves when it gets subtitled--the dialog isn't particularly difficult for those with a moderate knowledge of Japanese, and there are vast stretches of film with no dialog at all, but there are also a number of nuances that might be lost. The omnipresent Chinese and Cyrillic characters of the Asian Federation create an oppressive mood that'll be difficult to convey--the nearest example I can think of is the subliminal messages in John Carpenter's "They Live." Some of the other devices used in the film, such as multiple voices repeating portentous words "You don't know what war's like," might also be difficult to convey with normal subtitling. Nevertheless, I hope to see this film made available to a larger audience soon.

After reading the comments on IMDb I was second guessing getting the DVD. It was getting average scores, and many complained about the lack of action. I actually went into this film expecting some nice effects and that's about it...

Luckily I was wrong. The story was actually pretty entertaining. There were a couple of minor points I would have liked more information on, but living in North America I'm used to brainless plots because of Hollywood. In the end I thought the story was more than acceptable, and shouldn't cause anyone to pass by this film. It was the best attempt (at least it my eyes) thus far in creating an Anime movie with real actors.

I've been an avid fan of Asian cinema for a little over eight years now. I've seen a lot of good films, and a lot of bad ones. This is one of the good ones, and I hope people take time to view this film.

It's really a shame that crap like Azumi can score a 7.5 or higher on here, and something as beautiful and jaw dropping as this gets a lower score.