Terraformars

It's a really silly,funy movie. Special effects are great and story line is typical manga style.

This is one of those movies where you disengage your brain and grab a case of beer.

This is adapted from the manga of the same name. The story in the manga continues well past where this movie stops. That means that there are a lot of things that are set up here but not resolved. The main storyline is not revolved. I get that it is part of a longer story but a movie needs to have a beginning, a middle and an end. It needs to be able to stand on its own.

The effects for this are a real mixed bag. The sci-fi spaceship sets look really good. The CGI for the monsters looks really dated and poor. The costumes for the bug transformations mostly look terrible. There are a lot of characters but most of them are only there to get killed and get no development. The movie doesn't have much of a story. It's not one of those movies where nothing happens. Something is happening all of the time. There just isn't much of a through line. There's a not a lot of rhyme or reason to some of it. It really feels like it's condensed from a longer story and sometimes coherence suffers as a result. As for the ending, it doesn't have one as I mentioned before. It just sequel baits and then stops. This one flopped at the box office so that sequel is probably not coming.

I checked this out after reading the synopsis. I was hoping this would have some cool sci-fi ideas or something, but this is Sci-Fi like Dragonball Z is Sci-Fi. It's fun and imaginative at times, but it's absolute nonsense.

The basic premise is that we terraformed mars with moss and cockroaches, but the roaches evolved into massive humanoid beings whose only evolutionary purpose seems to be punching people's heads off. Luckily the humans have serums they inject themselves with that imbue them with the advantages of certain insects, but how a child might think of it where it's like very specific superpowers.

It's entertaining in a silly kind of way, but it's incredibly stupid.

Some reviewers have taken this movie far too seriously and read far too much into the it.

So imagine an 80's kids cartoon does The Breakfast Club with the plot of Aliens, all with a modern take. That's basically it. Plus being as it's Japanese you get crazy fight scenes with insects, bonkers daft and nothing to trouble the brain.

So yeah it's a Miike movie, but it also feels almost normal. Kind of formulaic in a way. Something you can sort of predict and see where it's going. Which is a weird thing to say about a Miike movie. But here we are (again). It's still fun, if you let yourself into it and just enjoy it for what it is (Miike light?).

So just don't expect this to go far out (even though it is mainly in space or beyond) and just take the weird character mix. This is almost like a film like "Man with the Iron Fist". The one RZA made, which is kind of a dream some Teenagers might have had. You know, throw in some ridiculous characters, let them do their thing. It's way funnier than the one RZA made of course, but still not masterpiece and certainly not something Miike fans might have been hoping for ...