Kyashan - La rinascita

Lat ANYBODY watch ANY 5 minutes of the movie and they will say "holy sh**t that is amazing". And at least back in 2004 it was mind-blowing what Casshern delivers in visuals and style. The director was a fashion designer or something and by all means: that shows. Casshern is a beauty.

But a beauty that feels like 6 hours and has nothing interesting to say. At some point you just end up being exhausted and bored. And it really is a pity.

We need Dario Argento to make an European cut with 75 Minutes runtime and have a blast with the outcome.

Casshern sacrifices narrative continuity in favour of aesthetic grandeur. Kazuaki Kiriya made his feature debut with Casshern and had previously devoted his time to music videos, the influence was overbearing. Soundtrack motifs played in crescendo to action sequences throughout the film, intense colour and CGI made the film visually intense but shot to shot and scene to scene continuity suffered. I found it difficult to follow the story often lost in a mess of fragmented shots and incoherent animations. The plot itself was no linear transgression of events, the film resolves instead on a message rather than a resolution. Kiriya places emphasis upon metaphor rather than storytelling which is unusual. Hollywood fans like myself will probably find the film too messy to deal with, Casshern leaves many loose ends which some may find intriguing. Casshern does offer stunning visuals with big budget action sequences and fresh looking CGI. For die hard 'Art film' fans, the film was so enigmatic and metaphorical, fans of narrative cinema like myself may fall asleep!

I have just finished watching Casshern and overall it was a visually stunning feast for the eyes with a beautifully woven fairytale at its heart. Unfortunately the fairytale was somewhat drowned under layer upon layer of heavy handed and mostly unnecessary exposition that ponders on for two long and mind-numbing hours, the result being that I am baffled by the entire experience. On the one hand I loved the movie; the style of the film was exceptional, every aspect of the world the director had created strained with the quality that is lacking in most western films. The cinematography was perfectly executed, the design work was breathtaking and the idea at the core of the narrative was ingenious. On the other hand these qualities cannot make up for the script, which is overly long and excruciatingly convoluted; taking an unnecessarily long and ponderous route to a conclusion that, in the hands of a better writer, could have been much more straightforward without necessarily losing any of the emotional complexity of the narrative or its characters. I would recommend seeing this movie if just to experience the spectacular visual feast that it is, but I can't help thinking that the story could have been treated so much better.

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.

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.