Sanpo suru shinryakusha

Seen at the Viennale 2017: At the beginning I liked this movie. I like the succinct dialogues that appear to be very often a trademark of Japanese movies. But with ongoing time, I sat in the cinema thinking: come on!, we got it, please show us the next scene. I did not look for the time. But it became a pain. Very often I thought, okay now comes the logical end. But no. Another intermediate dialogue had to be followed. And another one. And another one. At the end I was really exhausted.

The first 20 minutes of this film are amazing, eerie and keep you on the edge of your seat. Then the rest of the film falls flat from there. Some cool concepts but they're muddled all over the place and in the end, it's a one dimensional film that had so much promise but never delivered.

Worth watching the first 20 minutes.

Three star said it was boring - they're wrong - it's worse than boring. The storyline plot premise of aliens taking over human bodies to conquer the planet or whatever has many past iterations/forms all of which made an alien presence somewhat believable. In this case all we get are humans acting (actually stilted acting with lots of stilted talking) like narcissistic superficial humans - just talking about themselves. In the beginning there was a bloody (not shown - just aftermath) of daughter killing parents which made no sense and nothing came of it and then later a few scenes of brief gun battles between an alien human and humans and finally little fire balls coming down that was suppose to represent aliens invading (the special effects part).

Apparently, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, the director of the film, focus on expound the theme of the story mechanically, while structure of script is somewhat unsatisfactory. In addition, Kiyoshi Kurosawa did not deal with relationship well between the personal expression and mainstream value. However, because of veteran cinematography and proper performance, the executive ability of every single shot is very good. Therefore, in general, emotional expression is obviously better than the construct of world view in this film. In other words, the hesitation of director stops the film from becoming a classic work, if he could make a more determined decision, it will turn into a better film.

I can't really fairly review this movie because I pulled it off the internet and the home-made subtitles were often incomprehensible. But I can say that the trailer that inspired me to hunt this down was a lie. This is a two-hour movie with maybe 25 minutes of fighting and explosions, and the trailer made it look like a John Woo movie.

Instead, this is a rather slow-moving drama about extraterrestrials on earth to prepare an invasion. The most interesting idea in the film is that these aliens can only understand human concepts, like love or ownership, by absorbing them. Doing so removes that concept from the human, in some cases leaving them angry or confused but other times giving them a revelatory happiness.

I might have liked this movie more with better subtitles - certainly I would have been clearer on the fine points - but I would have rather watched the movie the trailer had promised me than the one I got.