Casshern - 2 Disc Special Edition [DVD]

Set in the not too distant future, a lad goes off to war - leaving behind his beautiful girlfriend and against the wishes of his dad - and then gets killed (the war scenes are mish mash of many war films from All Quiet of the Western Front and Stalingrad, through too Platoon and Full Metal Jacket). Dad meanwhile is developing a form of cloning/cell engineering and accidentally creates a race of super humans, who then run riot. Dad, now gutted at loosing his son, uses this technology to resurrect him. Son then goes up against the super humans. In a nutshell that's it - but the film delivers way more than that. Did I mention the giant robots?

Visually it's outstanding, combining many different styles and moods. One minute it all anime and cyberpunk, the next gothic, then grainy black and white before flipping back to lush colour and soft focus. And then there's the stop motion animation... Stylistically it's seems to have raided just about every genre going from both Eastern and Western cinema. There are nods to Metropolis, The Matrix, Battle of the Planets and, well the list goes on.

A couple of paragraphs are not enough to do this film justice, those that are interested in sci-fi, anime or just something different will enjoy this remarkable film - buy it, you won't regret it.

Anyway... From Battle Royale to Spirited Away via Akira, Tetsuo, Audition, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, The Happiness Of The Katakuris, Zatoichi and dozens of others, the examples of Asian cinema that manage to filter over to a western audience (praise be to independent cinemas and the "miracle" of DVD) seem to suggest that the people who produce (and, by association, make up the audience for) these films are completely and utterly insane. Or, at the least, have a very different cultural approach to violence, fantasy and society than we do. Casshern does absolutely nothing to counter this borderline xenophobic view.

In fact Casshern takes the biscuit. Casshern is about the most mental and crazed thing I have ever seen (bar Tetsuo, but that's another story).

It's like... a Japanese version of Sky Captain & The World Of Tomorrow except informed by 80s adult comics rather than 30s kids comics - try and imagine what that means; Watchmen, Dark Knight Returns, nastiness, death, conspiracy, war, religion, resurrection - not nice Jewish kids creating clean-living aspirational heroes. It's literally like Sky Captain (and the forthcoming Sin City) in that it's an almost entirely digital production bar the actors, who were shot on blue-screen with backgrounds painted in later on a computer. It's also literally like Sky Captain in that there are giant robots and flying buildings and crazy scientists. Only in Casshern there are also quasi-religious messiahs and pollution diseases and Freudian family romance and star-crossed lovers and mutant androids and swords and guns and a train so wide it needs five sets of rails.

It's like all three Matrix films rolled into one and then augmented by a bit of Apocalypse Now (the, um, "point" of the film is that war is nasty because humans are nasty and we should all love one another, such as the point matters). Don't expect to be abe to follow the plot (it's mental), don't expect anything to make sense, don't expect to empathise for the characters, don't expect those enormous unexplained happenings to ever be resolved (why is the lightening bolt that is a catalyst to the film's main event an ACTUAL SOLID OBJECT? for example), don't expect the slow boring bits to be profound in any understandable sense. In fact don't expect anything other than a bonkers trip into an alternate world that veers between joyously symbolic fakery and unsettling realism, where a superhero zombie who can fly and do cool karate chops that split giant robots in half saves the world only doesn't, really, and instead, possibly, flies off to a new planet with his girlfriend to start again. Or something.

In short, good fun, but absolutely ridiculous.