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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: CASSHERN (2004)

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DIRECTED BY: Kazuaki Kiriya

FEATURING: , , , Kanako Higuchi, Fumiyo Kohinata, Toshiaki Karasawa

PLOT: Dr. Azuma uses experimental cell-regrowth technology to resurrect his son Tetsuya, transforming him into a reluctant superhero and inadvertently creating a group of rebellious new humanoids who are prepared to destroy all of humanity.

Still from Casshern (2004)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Ambitious to a fault, Casshern is glorious excess, ricocheting from elaborate action sequence to moody introspection and back again, all against one ornately decorated backdrop after another. Even in its most intimate moments, this is a film that aims big: in plot, in look, in performance.

COMMENTS: The year was 2004, and the digital backdrop was ready to make a splash. A quartet of films offered an early look at the green-screen extravaganza that would come to dominate the cineplex, each one of them in their own way showing a path to the future. One of them, Able Edwards, looks exactly like its $30,000 budget. Immortal captured our attention by emphasizing weird flourishes. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow opted for star power, plopping some of Hollywood’s biggest names in front of glorious sepia-toned Art Deco images and directly into the heart of one of the most boring movies ever projected. And then there’s Casshern, Japan’s entry in the digital sweepstakes and probably the film that best augurs the current state of the movies; creating a fusion of intense action, elaborately appointed CGI landscapes, and liberal doses of operatic philosophical discussions conducted with aching intensity. Each, in their own way, led us to “The Mandalorian.”

Casshern has so much plot. It’s adapted from a 1973 anime series and absolutely feels like it, with volumes of backstory condensed into short bursts amidst the action and impassioned reflection. For most films, the showdown between humanity and the new creatures it has unintentionally Frankenstein-ed into existence would be conflict enough. Shellshocked Tetsuya finds an appropriately flamboyant opponent in Burai, the white-haired leader of the Neo-Sapien revolution.The history here, however, just keeps going back and back: to Tetsuya’s father as the inventor of neo-cells, to the intractable war between the two great powers, to the coverup of the true origin of humanity. Sometimes, Casshern has so much it wants to explain that it feels like it’s retconning itself in real time.

It’s all very, very serious. Tetsuya and love-of-his-life Luna can barely take a moment for themselves without reckoning with all they have lost. The various powers manipulating the situation from behind the scenes are too bureaucratic and officious to waste a moment on mustache-twirling. Even Burai and his grand pronouncements of world destruction are weighted with pain and vengeance. You would think that dressing themselves in fabulous supervillain gear, donning a logo that looks like the Nazis co-opted a 45 rpm adapter, and stumbling with unbelievable serendipity into an old factory for constructing killer robots would merit at least a moment of wry acknowledgement. But no, there’s not a smile to be found.

Music-video veteran Kiriya puts together some spectacular set pieces, including a tense escape from a laboratory under heavy fire and an exciting sword duel on the grounds of a decimated city. He’s always careful to keep the story rooted in philosophical quandary, though, which means the film is wildly inconsistent in tone and pace. (Shiro Sagisu’s score, which often feels wildly out of sync with what’s happening on the screen, doesn’t not help.) What’s most curious about this mix of moods is that everything feels essential, but mismatched, as if two different takes on the same material had been stitched together. A North American edit supposedly tightens up the more philosophical sections (and reportedly makes the story less comprehensible in the process), but it’s hard to see how that would help. For all the introspective diversions, “too slow” really isn’t one of Casshern’s problems.

For a superhero film that, for its look and its weight, could sit comfortably alongside any number of MCU and DCU entries, Casshern is not particularly fun, but it is fascinating. If you wanted to show how an anime could become live action, this would be a strong point of comparison. If you wanted to demonstrate the full potential of digital set design to create impossible worlds, this film opens the door. If you just want to embellish familiar sci-fi settings with a layer of existential dread, this definitely does the trick. All these things and more are possible. However, you just might want to decide which of those things you want the most.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… so stunning and strange to behold, saturating the screen with such rococo detail, that it is impossible to believe it was made for under 6 million US dollars… Casshern really does represent a spectacularly stylised mutation of the way we look at the world of war.” – Anton Bitel, Projected Figures

(This movie was nominated for review by Andrew Milne, who called it “utterly inscrutable and deliciously mad.” Andrew also recommended it to Tim Brayton at Alternate Ending, who got to his review long before we got to ours. Well played, Tim. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)   

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Casshern (DVD)

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    Capsules

    CAPSULE: PULSE (2001)

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    AKA Kairo

    DIRECTED BY:

    FEATURING: Haruhiko Katô, , Koyuki

    PLOT: A computer expert’s suicide is the first in a series of mysterious events and disappearances that leave Tokyo, and the world, depopulated; is a website that dials up people on its own and asks if they want to meet a ghost responsible?

    WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  It’s creepy and weirder than the average scare flick, but Pulse is tuned to the standard turn of the millennium J-horror wavelength.  It’s a good watch for fear fans, and a seminal one for Asian New Wave horror followers, but it doesn’t go that extra weird mile.  Kurosawa’s ambiguous horror/detective procedural Cure (1997) makes for a better bizarre candidate.

    COMMENTS: Pulse slips so quietly from reality to strangeness that you hardly recognize the transition; one minute, you’re watching its characters going about their daily lives, dealing with unexpected suicides and alarming computer viruses, and the next minute the world is almost deserted and ruled by ghosts.  The theme of this horror movie is not really fear but loneliness, and how technology fosters isolation more than cures it.  The film is not too subtle in delivering that message.  A plague of ghosts seems to spread via a computer website; one character immediately diagnoses a low-tech character’s sudden interest in the Internet as a desire to connect with his fellow man; a spirit tells the protagonist “death was eternal loneliness” from inside a foil-lined room.  Even scenes occurring before people start disappearing en masse are shot in disconcertingly deserted urban settings, on empty streets and buses and in lonely apartments.  Characters discuss the difficulty humans have making deep and lasting connections, while simultaneously hungering, struggling, and failing to form those bonds with each other.  Those who encounter one of the malevolent spirits in Pulse go through a syndrome (ghost traumatic stress disorder?) that involves locking themselves inside a room alone and sealing the door with red tape.  What the movie intends to say on the metaphorical level is very clear; what’s a little more confused is what’s supposed to be happening on the literal level.  We get half-baked exposition regarding the mechanics of the ghost world, but the spirits’ malevolent motives aren’t ever clearly explained, and it’s not at all certain how all the pieces are supposed to fit together.  If, as one sage tells us, the dead are now leaking into our world because theirs has exceeded its capacity, how do they benefit from convincing the living to kill themselves?  Wouldn’t that just worsen their overpopulation problem?  If the spirits of the dead have no place to go, shouldn’t the world be overrun with ghostly presences, rather than empty?  What purpose in setting up the spectral website that dials up users on its own—other than to scare a technophobic audience?  The movie glosses over answers to these questions, which does make it feel like a weirder endeavor; in this case, however, it seems the material might benefit from a fairer stab at clarity.  But Kiyoshi (no relation to Akira) Kuroswa is all about atmosphere, and he’s an expert at conjuring it.  The long lonely narrative spaces are broken up by several memorable moments, including glitchy technostrangeness involving a metaphysically malfunctioning webcam with a distorting lens, bizarre broadcast television interference from the Beyond, people who melt into black smudges on the wall, and a genuinely frightening trip inside “The Forbidden Room” to discuss matters of mortality with the death’s head who dwells therein.  Mood, not logic or even philosophy, is the glue that holds the movie together, and while it isn’t the horror masterpiece it might have been if that atmosphere was yoked to a better story, it works well on the shiver-inducing level.

    The dumbed-down 2006 Hollywood remake with Kirsten Bell, part of a trend of bastardized American remakes of J-horror classics, was widely despised by critics and audiences alike.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “…dolorous, shivery, and surreal.”–Wesley Morris, Boston Globe (contemporaneous)