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Casshern
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Mice, Fish, Lobster, Dog, Kissing, Marriage.
Considering it's hyper-stylized visuals, I have one prevailing thought after having watched this movie:
**** AVALON.
There's no... *laugh* the THOUGHT that Avalon could be better than is is... horrid, wrong, wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. This is a GOOD MOVIE and ~UGH!~ no one's gonna believe me!
It goes overboard with the visual filters, it's plastered in too-low-texture CG which make some pretty bum composition shots, and honestly the anime superhero thing doesn't do it much of any favors at all, this isn't an action movie, it's a drama, and as a drama it's fricken'... WORTH THE EFFORT, it's GOOD!
The first 40 minutes of pure setup in this movie are just great. It's this grandiose operatic tale about a family driven apart by war. The father, who works in medicine, detests war and resents his son for going. We have this excellent scene in which his wife, whose blindness he hopes to cure, greets her son having returned from battle only moments before a military official shows up to inform her he actually died in the field.
Around the same time a freak occurrence twists the father's regenerative cell research into undead and when the military, who were the only ones to okay his research, try to gun them down, they're forced to escape and the leader among them swears vengeance upon humanity for their callous disregard for life. Almost the entire sequence of their escape is an epic montage of their unspoken trek out into nowhere as the wounded and underdeveloped among them die along the way, a mother is forced to bury her baby, there's roaring at the sky, it's just a very emotional journey for these characters we know nothing about all up until our main guy takes up a throne in a fortress and says "We live!" before delivering a rock-solid villain speech.
These "Neo-Sapiens" raise up a robot army and wage war on the world while our protagonist is secretly revived using a similar method and preserved in armor that keeps him together.
The rest of the movie takes a step down in narrative cohesion when it actually attempts to pull off some action which is some serious mood whiplash to suddenly get all anime on us. It's brief and it ranges from crap to cool and this isn't aided by an even worse attempt to distinguish the political factions behind the ongoing war effort. There's like half a dozen guys vying for control that may be apart of one faction? Or another? Which side is the country our protagonists are in? Is it just one side? I'm not sure, but they backstab each other and I never cared.
Some DEFINITE unexplained plot points which I guess we're just expected to take as environmental plot devices like...
What's with the weird metal lightning bolt that completes the research?
Why/How does it teleport Casshern to a plot-relevant location?
What was that non-specific life-threatening fainting blindness disease his wife suffered from?
When did pollution ever get established as a danger?
What did the first two Neo-Sapiens see before they died?
Why are there suddenly souls at the end? Why do they converge on Casshern?
How do you just FIND a giant robot army? That's the one that gets me. There isn't even any throwaway line about a "nation lost to war" or anything like that, nope, it's just an intact fortress sitting in the middle of nowhere packed full of giant, obedient, self-sufficient, death robots that can be freely and easily controlled by a single unprotected person with a bone to pick.
That would REALLY bother me if it wasn't just part of the setup and not a Deus Ex Machina in the third act, that would've been major ********.
There's also this one classical backing track that I recognize because I've heard it a million times and it seriously distracted me since the rest of the movie runs on otherwise pretty good original music.
Overall the movie has a very potent anti-war theme going on, it even squeezes down on it's main character who at one point confronts himself in a hallucination for having committed terrible atrocities in the name of "duty" and "country" and "just following orders".
*MIND BLOWN* That just so perfectly curves right back into an earlier line about what value there is to life if it can just be casually restored. All that does is uninhibit casually taking it away.
It almost all comes full circle and honestly it was a pretty emotional 2-and-a-half hour ride I strongly recommend.
As long as you can stand a lot of unnecessarily obvious CG and a couple major inciting plotholes.
If nothing else, it makes me want to watch the show which is a commendable service rendered by any adaption.
Final Verdict: [Pretty Good]
Casshern
Sci-Fi Superhero Drama / Japanese / 2004
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
For the Action Movie Countdown.
This is probably one of my oldest watchlist items which I just keep procrastinating on. It's a 2 and a half hour live-action steampunk-ish (not really) adaption of a what looks like a cheesy anime. I'm SO not looking forward to this.
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
This is probably one of my oldest watchlist items which I just keep procrastinating on. It's a 2 and a half hour live-action steampunk-ish (not really) adaption of a what looks like a cheesy anime. I'm SO not looking forward to this.
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
"We're not just here to exist, but to have the strength to co-exist."
Mice, Fish, Lobster, Dog, Kissing, Marriage.
Considering it's hyper-stylized visuals, I have one prevailing thought after having watched this movie:
**** AVALON.
There's no... *laugh* the THOUGHT that Avalon could be better than is is... horrid, wrong, wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. This is a GOOD MOVIE and ~UGH!~ no one's gonna believe me!
It goes overboard with the visual filters, it's plastered in too-low-texture CG which make some pretty bum composition shots, and honestly the anime superhero thing doesn't do it much of any favors at all, this isn't an action movie, it's a drama, and as a drama it's fricken'... WORTH THE EFFORT, it's GOOD!
The first 40 minutes of pure setup in this movie are just great. It's this grandiose operatic tale about a family driven apart by war. The father, who works in medicine, detests war and resents his son for going. We have this excellent scene in which his wife, whose blindness he hopes to cure, greets her son having returned from battle only moments before a military official shows up to inform her he actually died in the field.
Around the same time a freak occurrence twists the father's regenerative cell research into undead and when the military, who were the only ones to okay his research, try to gun them down, they're forced to escape and the leader among them swears vengeance upon humanity for their callous disregard for life. Almost the entire sequence of their escape is an epic montage of their unspoken trek out into nowhere as the wounded and underdeveloped among them die along the way, a mother is forced to bury her baby, there's roaring at the sky, it's just a very emotional journey for these characters we know nothing about all up until our main guy takes up a throne in a fortress and says "We live!" before delivering a rock-solid villain speech.
These "Neo-Sapiens" raise up a robot army and wage war on the world while our protagonist is secretly revived using a similar method and preserved in armor that keeps him together.
The rest of the movie takes a step down in narrative cohesion when it actually attempts to pull off some action which is some serious mood whiplash to suddenly get all anime on us. It's brief and it ranges from crap to cool and this isn't aided by an even worse attempt to distinguish the political factions behind the ongoing war effort. There's like half a dozen guys vying for control that may be apart of one faction? Or another? Which side is the country our protagonists are in? Is it just one side? I'm not sure, but they backstab each other and I never cared.
Some DEFINITE unexplained plot points which I guess we're just expected to take as environmental plot devices like...
What's with the weird metal lightning bolt that completes the research?
Why/How does it teleport Casshern to a plot-relevant location?
What was that non-specific life-threatening fainting blindness disease his wife suffered from?
When did pollution ever get established as a danger?
What did the first two Neo-Sapiens see before they died?
Why are there suddenly souls at the end? Why do they converge on Casshern?
How do you just FIND a giant robot army? That's the one that gets me. There isn't even any throwaway line about a "nation lost to war" or anything like that, nope, it's just an intact fortress sitting in the middle of nowhere packed full of giant, obedient, self-sufficient, death robots that can be freely and easily controlled by a single unprotected person with a bone to pick.
That would REALLY bother me if it wasn't just part of the setup and not a Deus Ex Machina in the third act, that would've been major ********.
There's also this one classical backing track that I recognize because I've heard it a million times and it seriously distracted me since the rest of the movie runs on otherwise pretty good original music.
Overall the movie has a very potent anti-war theme going on, it even squeezes down on it's main character who at one point confronts himself in a hallucination for having committed terrible atrocities in the name of "duty" and "country" and "just following orders".
WARNING: "Casshern" spoilers below
This very suddenly and SHOCKINGLY shifts neatly into a sanctity-of-life theme. We've had numerous characters die left and right as the movie goes on and up till the end we pretty much put Main Guy's dad on the protagonist's bench. When it's all over and he wants to revive his wife the same way, Casshern resists because of everything it caused, WHICH I honestly don't buy, none of this can be blamed on any one person coming back to life that's a total red herring, BUT suddenly he whips out a gun and shoots his daughter and says he'll revive her too, as a means to WIN AN ARGUMENT.
*MIND BLOWN* That just so perfectly curves right back into an earlier line about what value there is to life if it can just be casually restored. All that does is uninhibit casually taking it away.
It almost all comes full circle and honestly it was a pretty emotional 2-and-a-half hour ride I strongly recommend.
As long as you can stand a lot of unnecessarily obvious CG and a couple major inciting plotholes.
If nothing else, it makes me want to watch the show which is a commendable service rendered by any adaption.