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I recently remembered reading about this somewhere on Barbelith, and immediately bought the DVD on the strength of the online trailer alone. Having watched it in a somewhat... chemically altered state, my impressions are a little blurred, but nevertheless.
[spoilers in here somewhere]
The sense of place throughout, and indeed the total visual aesthetic, was utterly fantastic...the settings were almost never unconvincing, except in some of the sequences which it later became apparent were hallucinations (I particularly like the scene in which Tetsuya is imagining having a calm discussion with Luna about why he must leave her alone, but is in fact screaming "It is my duty to my country!" over and over). The various different filming techniques/visual idioms seemed to gel surprisingly well, and the war sequences were genuinely painful to watch, although it took me a while to recognise Tetsuya's ghost early on due to the difficult nature of the war-story footage. The (surprisingly scant) battle scenes were utterly bizarre and consistently surprising with their visual innovation: the intercutting between the giant robots as flat black silhouettes against a red background and their real-world appearance was deeply satisfying, as was the use of genuinely deranged music, especially the repeated motif of the sound of the motor revving up in the background just before a conflict occurs. The whole thing was just so fantastically well-constructed to give a sense of a world gone terribly wrong, and the whole Second World War aesthetic added a whole extra historical resonance to the total moral bankruptcy of almost all of the characters. Little things like the Casshern-suit's turning from initial pure white to eventual burnt black and red and the use of black and white imagery to indicate the false dichotomy created by violence add up to an almost operatic whole - many of the action sequences reminded me of a music-video idiom, partly because that's one of the few mass-cultural outlets in the West where it's positively encouraged to create innovative, not-entirely-realistic visuals, and partly because of the sheer density and pace. The eventual simultaneous demonisation and humanisation of all the characters was deeply powerful and genuinely unexpected, especially Dr. Azuma's murder of Luna in the climactic scene. The passivity of the female characters is somewhat difficult, however - although (apart from the doctor in Sector 7) they're the only morally uncompromised figures, they're represented as simple reflections to the tempestuous main characters, posessed of almost infinite compassion and impacting on the plot only as objects to be sought and reclaimed. However, I rather feel that that's the point to some extent - if in this milieu to live is to harm a sort of cosmic gestalt soul, and this is mirrored by the actions of life when it is separated, then the only way to live is a path of almost passive tolerance - the female characters are morally heroic by refraining. Also mildly concerned about the Neoroid sidekick with (some sort of disability? It's unclear whether this is a failure of the regenerative process or whether he initially had said disability before being cut up into little bits) being played for laughs in some scenes, although his stop-motion dream sequences are nothing short of beautiful...
Tom Tit - I read the detonation of Tetsuya and Luna at the end as a suicide (it looks like one of them is pulling pipes out of the suit so it'll explode) allowing the total life-force of the human race remaining to come together and form another lightning-bolt to start life somewhere else in the galaxy, the "hope" being that the new lifeforms won't fuck it up as the humans and Neoroids have. Gah... Just the way every single character in the film is given humanity and a back-story and not one single death is thrown away gives me the shivers even now...
So, has anyone else seen this recently? I'd be very interested in finding out anything else adopting this particular visual or spiritual idiom as well, as I'm frankly rubbish at non-Western, non-mainstream cinema... |
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