Andromedia

I've read a bit and found out about how Takashi Miike goes about making films. First off, it's almost never his idea for the film. A screenwriter or producer will contact him and then the ball will start rolling.

Here's the deal with Andromedia (the American title): Takashi Miike's prior film was The Bird People of China, which showed that he could actually direct an

audience friendly, traditional, and dare I say mainstream film. Miike was not terribly interested when someone contacted him about Andromedia. However,

he found an element of satire in the idea of the film, and I don't blame him. The plot of this picture is that a girl, Mai, dies, and her father, using the unexplained "magic" of computers, uploads her memories into an A.I system (cutely named

Ai). Oh, and there are two bad Japanese pop groups thrown into the system.

What emerges is Miike's stab at satire, at best. At worst, it's a sappy teen drama with poorly developed characters and an undefined plot. At the end of the film, you really do not realize what the villains in the film were up to. Ever. There is no motivation given for any of the villains. In fact, there is a double-betrayal towards the end of the movie that makes absolutely no sense at all.

So I chose to view the film as a satire, realizing that I had totally wasted my money expecting the usual from Takashi Miike (violence, sex, human emotions,

and dark, dark humor). Turns out I was not even granted good satire. The few

moments of hilarity come whenever boy-band Da Pump is on screen, especially

during their hilariously bad musical number, featuring pyrotechnics and bad

dance steps. Other than that, the film actually seems to take itself seriously. Which is really depressing considering how bad it is.

So, if you're looking for an interesting teen drama, don't bother. If you're looking for a satire, don't bother. And if you're looking for Takashi Miike, I don't know where the hell he went either.

4/10

Wow. This movie is a serious stinker. Bad special effects, terrible plot points seemingly ripped straight out of the Matrix and Tron, and meanderings into N*Sync dance routines really hamstring this movie from the get-go. I didn't exactly hate it, but it was one of the last domestically available Miike flicks that I hadn't seen and now I know how this one filtered down to the bottom of the list. Sure, there are a handful of scenes that could be called Miike-ian: (the assassin guy turning and looking pensively down the illuminated hallway, the bats flying in the city street, the blossoms falling beneath the beach sakura tree . . .). But for the most part, the film is just a cheesy vehicle for Speed to try and prove that they can act. No dice, ladies.

Even if, in the future, he becomes the world's most beloved director and everyone everywhere seeks out all his films, Andromedia will be forgotten. There's really no such thing as "typical Miike", but this film is somehow definitely atypical Miike. It's a teeny cyber-thriller that stars not one, but two Japanese teen pop groups, Speed and Da Pump, both of which get a song. Da Pump, the boy band, even gets their own music video in the middle of the movie for no good reason. So, yeah, it's kind of corny, but it's corny in a fun way. And it's just fun to see Miike do this kind of pap. The film's villains – whose motives we never really understand – are goofy and entertaining, especially Christopher Doyle, best know as the cinematographer of Zhang Yimou's Hero, who plays a shorts-wearing evil corporate guy from Detroit. He looks like he was downloaded from the mid-80s. Doyle even gets to dance during Da Pump's big musical number. So Andromedia's not half bad if you can take a bit of goofiness.

More than any other Miike movie, suspended disbelief is an absolute prerequisite for watching this Sci-Fi soap opera / J-Pop video. Cuteness, chrome, and special FX ooze from the screen on every stage of the bubble-gum tale of "love conquers all" with the over-the-top melodramatic absurdity of a sakura tree blossoming in the middle of a beach. In the words of one of the characters in his ultimate Jesus/Oedipus moment of surrender to his own fate: "This is ironic. At the very last moment I finally learn of that man's true motives." Ironically Miike's viewers can't say the same, which most likely, is his true motive.

Recommended only to fans of both Miike AND J-Pop.

Talk about a project for hire- this is one of those under-seen movies that is understandably kept nowhere in your local blockbuster, and only discovered on Netflix or Amazon by the fans of director Takashi Miike who might want to look for something even more 'different' than his high-voltage yakuza pictures and surreal nightmares. In a sense Andromedia is still a surreal nightmare, only this time filled with so much corny vibes that you'd have to be the biggest air-head 13 year old girl not to see the humor in it. I'm sure Miike had to see it too, otherwise he probably wouldn't of touched it with a 20 foot pole. It's the kind of work that's too weird to be popular, ever, in America, and I wonder looking at the response here on IMDb if there's even much awareness for it in Japan. It tells a love story with images like the cherry orchard (on a beach) meant to accentuate the power of the main teen couple (Mai and Yu played by typical but dippy Hiroko Shimabukuro and Kenji Harada respectfully). Mai, by the way, is not really Mai, but Ai, her previous self's memory packed into a computer simulation form of herself after her sudden death.

It's not just Yu who wants her, but there's also some nefarious villains who want her via the technology for no really big reasons (no world domination, at least I don't think so) other than just having it cause it's there. One of these guys is very strangely played by Christopher Doyle, a DP for directors like Van Sant and Wong Kar Wai, who happens to have a haircut like a muskrat long dead and made into a wig. He has his goons chase after Yu, and his friends as well, just after that laptop with poor Mai (err, Ai), leading up to a climax that doesn't really make much sense except to have really over-the-top CGI effects. Actually, much of the film doesn't make too much sense, but if you don't get that by the thirty minute marker, just throw out the movie. I didn't know going into it that it was also, in part, meant to be a partial commercial for two pop-music groups (though the very oddly placed and uproariously funny music video in the middle of the movie marks as something of a crazy marvel in Miike's cannon).

Of course, it will never mark as a must-see even for most Miike fans, and I'm sure some who come across it will just keep scratching their heads once it's over. Though after seeing several other films from the massively prolific director, I'm kind of glad to see that there is such a fluffy side to his savage satire, and how in-between the sickeningly cutesy love moments (like when Mai and Yu have a real 'connection', where a carnival lights up and the nearly wretched music cues up) there's still some bits that remind one of the heedlessly inventive and demented wild-man of Japanese cinema. The only thing funnier, sometimes unintentionally sometimes not, than seeing Yu and his boy-band friends jumping off the cliffs to relative safety, or the brain-tumored gangster Takanaka getting enveloped in the horrendous tubes of the internet center, or the *very* late 90s mix of Backstreet Boys-styled music and CGI, is that this was originally based on a book! It's poof, slight, and it almost marks a form of campy, sci-fi pop-art.