This is a hijacking

This was going to be a post about Asian-America. But screw that. I just finished watching Casshern(2004), and it's hijacking this blog space. By force.

But speaking of hijacking, Casshern does just that as well, taking a generic '70s superhero anime and compression molding it into a visually composited moral collage on the universalism of hatred and war. Plus a theme song by the director's wife (Utada Hikaru).

For a clear exposition of the plot, see this review from Midnight Eye. Also be aware that sometime in 2005, the studios are planning on unleashing this monstrosity of a movie on American (and other) audiences. Don't say you weren't warned. Why monstrous? Too much Beethoven in the soundtrack. Too many layers and filters to abstract the footage. Garish theatrical sets employing heavy-handed historical symbolism. Too little irony, and too many overwrought soliloquies. And . . . the cliche'd use of retro-future aesthetics (but it's still kinda cool to see people dialing from antique rotary phones and connecting to sleek 3G-style clamshell phones).

I'm being obscure here, of course, but what makes this movie so hard to ignore and write-off, despite being an unmitigated mess, is the fact that it is entirely serious when it visually links THE WAR ON TERROR(sic) and the JAPANESE OCCUPATION OF CHINA. Battle Royale II tried to do something similar, but only ended up jumping on the Anti-American bandwagon and focusing on Japanese historical victimhood. Both films do in fact inject real-world footage of war and death into their fantasy milieus, but while BR2 has the propagandist tendency to eliminate any ambiguity in the roles of 'victim' and 'oppressor', Casshern boomerangs right back onto itself. Not surprisingly, its ending also discards all the technological explanations and moral arguments that come before it. It's simply not possible to guess how it'll end from only the clues in the plot. And much as the movie cannot propose any solution to the cycle of war and vengeance, it dispenses with explanation and ends on an elegy.

But as I just mentioned, the most powerful aspect of this movie is its historical consciousness. Now, there have been plenty of movies positing a different post-war for Japan. This one begins with the assumption that Japan has conquered 'Eurasia' and become a superstate filled with Cyrillic and Chinese iconography. But even with victory, they face an unending insurgency on a continent filled with 'terrorists', especially 'Zone 7' which appears to be the Chinese countryside. The dingy concrete tanks from which the 'neo-sapiens' arise look eerily similar to the photographs of Unit 731's research facilities in Northern China. The grainy black-and-white segments showing the systematic slaughter of civilians focus on women dressed in what appear to be Chinese traditional gowns. Add elements of medical horror, soldiers in gasmasks, and a brief flash of a mushroom cloud, and the film's imagery is surprisingly complete in terms of war in the 20th century.

But objectively speaking, this movie is ponderous. The dialogue is stifling. The female characters spend most of the movie looking begrieved, but saying little. Character development is on the level of a paper puppet play. The plot is equally incredulous, having to make compromises to fit the original plot of the anime series. Example: the 'villains' need an army of robots to threaten humankind. So, they find them.

However, as other reviewers have written, what makes the movie difficult to simply laugh off is it's intermittent flashes of brilliance. As a 2+ hour long aesthetic enterprise it is incomparable. As a definitive statement on ‘war = human nature’, it is foolhardy and over-ambitious. What makes it worthwhile is its intricately constructed and self-reflexive question to the Japanese: Would the world be a better place if Japan had won the war? And to the Americans: What are you going to do now that you've 'won'?