DanDV

This movie earned high acclaimed because apparently it was the first one to explore the topic of the protagonist discovering they have only a limited time to live.

But that doesn't mean it's a GOOD movie on this topic, but modern standards. Nope, not at all. If that's what you seek, watch "The Bucket List" or "The Fault in our Stars".

Ikiru is tedious, slow, boring, often pointless, other times absurd, and overall hard to relate to, even for someone in their 40s.

The opening sequence is a somewhat amusing portrayal of public office bureaucracy, which earns it one extra star. But beyond that, not worth watching given other movies with the same theme.

This movie shows how being a "critic" is all about closed-circle intellectual circle-jerking among your fellow critics. How so many "prominent critics" rated this above 6/10, is beyond me.

Not only is the acting so bad as to be a style of its own, the plot is full of holes as deep as the space. The protagonist is a conservationist and it takes him weeks (months?) to realize that his beloved forest is dying because it doesn't have sufficient light?!

Then there's the glaring technological discrepancy between robot drones that apparently have sufficient AI to understand natural language commands, but can't synthesize voice, an achievement that was unlocked before the movie was filmed (the first voice synthesis systems date from the 50s; and we're talking about a SciFi movie here).

Then there's nothing about the life support systems on that ship; how artificial gravity is created when we never see the spacecraft rotate etc.

Gah.