A Thousand Monkey on a Thousand Computers...
More of that Digital Age Thang
George Lucas made a great observation in his commentary on one of the original three Star Wars films (Do you really need to know which one?). He talked about how people complained about the fakeness of digital special effects, specifically in dealing with characters or creatures, to which he then asked "does a guy in a rubber suit look less fake"? I hadn't exactly thought of it that way. My feeling up until then had always been: If it's new technology shouldn't we work with it an hone it (ie. make it look real) before splashing every screen with it? In truth, many times it's no worse and a lot of times it's much better looking than rubber suit effects. For me personally, I just always liked having something real (ie. tangible, actually on set) more to having actors act against things that aren't there.
However, it isn't just 'to rubber suit or not to rubber suit,' now it's a decision on whether to build anything at all. On one hand, I understand it. Working on graphics and whatnot on a computer vs. hand drawing them definitely has it's advantages. It does create a certain speed (certainly in editing and refining), but opens up a whole other issues with just about everything else. Part of the problem is hacking away at a computer for hours on end. I noticed that guys in the model shops who worked with their hands showed little of the fatigue that guys working on computers all day in other departments showed.
The reason I bring it up though, goes back to my initial paragraph about what I said about what George said. Why is it that for all the improvements in the technology, the movies themselves haven't gotten much better apart from the visuals? No matter how much or how often people complain about it, still no one seems to realize, you gotta tell a story first. (Ironically, you can go even further and ask: Why with all the computer technology in the world haven't we seen any new Shakespeares? But I risk a digression.)
Which brings us to our case in point:
Casshern (2004, d. Kazuaki Kiriya)
The Story: With the world divided into two warring factions, a brilliant scientist, while trying to create replaceable body parts for dying soldiers, inadvertently creates a race of destructive supermen and resurrects his son into the only being that can stop them.
The Review (of sorts): In some ways I wanted to pose this against the American feature, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004, d. Kerry Conran). Even better, I wish I had seen the French feature, Immortel(2004, d. Enki Bilal), to also bring it into the discussion. All three used similar techniques of almost wholly digital worlds with filmed actors in them to tell their stories. Just comparing the two doesn't seem to work well enough with a third out there, and I've got too much to say on the one I started with.
Ok, it's sort of granted that one of the problems I have with Casshern is a convention that's often shows up in certain Japanese cinema, namely the anime-based stuff. I've seen it in a couple of other features, both animated and live-action. It's a kind of cinematic short hand. Having never looked into it far enough, I assume that there's an assumption that because the story already exists (either in novelized or in television series form), then there's no need for fully hashing out all the details. In the case of Casshern, the movie was based on a 70's animated series called Robot Hunter: Casshan (Shinzo Ningen: Casshan), though from what I can tell about the series (I know I've seen an episode or two at some point), the movie is fairly different. Still, this narrative style of sorts isn't quite enough for me to totally forgive some of the movie's faults.
For instance, we know that there's a war going on in the world, but we're never quite made to understand enough about the war, nor do we ever see enough of it to really understand how it's affecting this movie world (other than everything being dirty and industrial) because it's removed from the action. There is some explanatory exposition and some sporadic flashbacks, but it's never quite enough. Though this horrific reality molds and shapes everything about the story and it's characters, it's been left too far into the back ground. That's only for starters. The movie does move along pretty well for the first half hour, and the engagement does stem beyond just arresting visuals. Dr. Azuma, who we've gotten to know pretty well, appears close to completing his experiments when.....well, that's the problem, I'm not sure what to fill in the blank with.
The tubs that contain all the body parts are struck by some sort of metallic bolt of lightning. You know, the kind that comes out of nowhere with no explanation whatsoever. The kind that remains as some sort of symbol, not to mention the kind that turns mysterious body parts into a new kind of superhuman. Of course, by now, you realize that this is the same kind of that resurrects dead soldiers...well, only if they're the sons of the scientist whose tanks these are. From there it only gets clearer....(unfortunately there's not many ways to inject sarcasm into the printed page, however)...and boy does it look cool. (That actually wasn't sarcastic.)
Now like I said, a lot of this is by-the-books for animé stuff, but unlike some of the better written animé series or movies which take the time to at least hint at the mysterious goings-on (even if they never really explain it), this one just keeps sweeping by like a whirlwind. Additionally, things just keep happening to pop up to take care of the things that just happened to happen. For instance, for reasons unknown, our resurrected hero's body is going out of control because of the powers injected into when he was brought back to life. Not to worry though, because his girlfriend's dad just happens to have a cool body armor that will contain it...and...allow him to whoop @$$ at no extra cost. Ok, fine. Moving on. (There's a shot of the helmet Casshan/Casshern wore in the series which furthers my suspicions about this being plot-line shorthand since it's an obvious nod to the predecessor.)
Let's turn to our "villains." I put that in quotations because frankly...it's not really clear. What's funny is that in most of the reviews I've looked at for this film, everyone seems to think it's pretty obvious that the newly formed superhumans, "Neoroids" as they name themselves, are villains. This bothers me because I'm not sure that's what the movie was saying (not that I know what it was saying exactly). For one, when the Neoroids are slaughterd by soldiers as they escape Azuma's lab, it seems to be a pretty downbeat display. They're naked, dirty, frightened, and that's before they start getting mowed down. When they kidnap Azuma's wife (ok that's bad), there's a whole subplot about her bringing out their humanity. Oh, not to mention that our hero murdered the people who the regenerated body parts were made out of (who now reformed into the Neoroids, etc...see what I mean about this plot?). The weird part is that yes, in between this, they do perform some standardized villain-type bad stuff....hmmm...like attacking the "hero", and trying to wipe out most of humanity....Now wait a minute...
I've talked about the villains, but what about the "good" guys, or at the very least, every other character in the movie. Well there's the general and council who are shown as nothing but self-serving war-mongering old men. Then there's the general's son, who overthrows the council, but also turns out to be an immature and petty war-mongerer. There's Doctor Azuma who is really only trying to save his wife's eyesight with the cloned body parts which is kinda selfish and in this way is also feeding the war effort. Our hero, Casshern, ran off to fight in the war against his father's wishes, committed war atrocities, but who did get himself killed trying to save someone else. Only, upon his return, he basically just whoops @$$ against our too sympathetic villains, and the general's son's army whom we don't really care about anyway. In other words, nothing all that heroic. You could say "Well, he's trying to save the human race," but the only problem is that this dirty war-filled selfish nasty world doesn't seem worth saving. To be honest, I found the lead "villain" comparable to Roy Baty in Blade Runner...and in this case, it almost seeme like he would win. I would've cheered for him, except I knew that Casshern would inevitably still save the day.
But boy, it looked prety darn cool! And I'm absolutely serious. It did.
So the point seems to be something about man's inhumanity to man (or super-man) and something about scientific irresponsibility. In this case, I know a lot of this stems from philosophical strains that have filtered down through the generations and into the Japanese cinema as a result of events in World War II that the Japanese were responsible for (experimental atrocities against war prisoners) and that they were attacked by (nuclear weapons). Granted the series has wandered away quite a bit from it, but it's the same breeding ground that the original Godzilla was born in. The problem is that nothing about this movie is clear...and no, I don't think that was the point. The point seemed to be: Make it look cool. The rest seemed to be an attempt or a failed attempt to fit in all the other stuff.
Having confused themes, and grey area issues are not wrong in and of itself...but an adventure movie is not the place for them. Take Apocalypse Now. As a dramatic piece, it contemplates the horrors of war, the confusion of morality, and it's "hero" isn't much of a hero in the same way as say Hercules or James Bond is a hero. Imagine a Bond movie where the lines were all confused and bizzare, and you found Ernst Blofeld to be a more sympathetic character than Bond. Sure, you might appreciate the originality of it, but I doubt it'd be the entry that you liked the best. Even having a well rounded villain isn't a bad thing, in fact I appreciate it, but it doesn't work very well if your hero doesn't get the same consideration. What really does it here is that our "hero" has the look and would-be feel of a superhero, and we all know there's nothing grey area about Superman or Spiderman (at least not like this movie). Not that you can't do it, but it's got to be developed far better than this, if you're going to try. (If they were trying here, they didn't try hard enough.)
Thing is, for all the money, time, and effort that had to be poured into this movie, it almost seems a total waste because it only seemed to work in little pretty moments. However, pretty moments don't make me want to watch it again, nor would I recommend it to anyone (except as a curiosity. Bear in mind I love Fellini's Satyricon which I still can't satisfactorily explain, which I would recommend, but it was an artsy movie.). It needed a story first. A really good story. I think that there were the elements for one in there, but they needed to either be cleaned up or expanded upon to make them work better. Having said all this, I don't want to make it sound like artless trash. After all, if it was totally artless, I would have never finished watching it, or I would have only I would've been more annoyed. (Of course the flipside of that is if it was really really artless and artfully trashy, I would have enjoyed it more, but for all the wrong reasons.
So back to the point we started with: Visuals and special effects, particularly in this new breed of all digital movie, are still supposed to be tools of the story. No matter how realistic they may get, they don't take the place of a well-told story. The stop motion monsters in a Harryhausen movie may now look hokey as all heck, but as long as the stories are better, then I'll stick with the goofy monsters. Hopefully more people feel the same way about it...and eventually maybe the movies will begin to reflect that. Hopefully.
Cheers.
(P.S. I did like Sky Captain quite a bit. It was a little light on substance, but it made for an entertaining and cohesive story which was all it was trying for.)
More of that Digital Age Thang
George Lucas made a great observation in his commentary on one of the original three Star Wars films (Do you really need to know which one?). He talked about how people complained about the fakeness of digital special effects, specifically in dealing with characters or creatures, to which he then asked "does a guy in a rubber suit look less fake"? I hadn't exactly thought of it that way. My feeling up until then had always been: If it's new technology shouldn't we work with it an hone it (ie. make it look real) before splashing every screen with it? In truth, many times it's no worse and a lot of times it's much better looking than rubber suit effects. For me personally, I just always liked having something real (ie. tangible, actually on set) more to having actors act against things that aren't there.
However, it isn't just 'to rubber suit or not to rubber suit,' now it's a decision on whether to build anything at all. On one hand, I understand it. Working on graphics and whatnot on a computer vs. hand drawing them definitely has it's advantages. It does create a certain speed (certainly in editing and refining), but opens up a whole other issues with just about everything else. Part of the problem is hacking away at a computer for hours on end. I noticed that guys in the model shops who worked with their hands showed little of the fatigue that guys working on computers all day in other departments showed.
The reason I bring it up though, goes back to my initial paragraph about what I said about what George said. Why is it that for all the improvements in the technology, the movies themselves haven't gotten much better apart from the visuals? No matter how much or how often people complain about it, still no one seems to realize, you gotta tell a story first. (Ironically, you can go even further and ask: Why with all the computer technology in the world haven't we seen any new Shakespeares? But I risk a digression.)
Which brings us to our case in point:
Casshern (2004, d. Kazuaki Kiriya)
The Story: With the world divided into two warring factions, a brilliant scientist, while trying to create replaceable body parts for dying soldiers, inadvertently creates a race of destructive supermen and resurrects his son into the only being that can stop them.
The Review (of sorts): In some ways I wanted to pose this against the American feature, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004, d. Kerry Conran). Even better, I wish I had seen the French feature, Immortel(2004, d. Enki Bilal), to also bring it into the discussion. All three used similar techniques of almost wholly digital worlds with filmed actors in them to tell their stories. Just comparing the two doesn't seem to work well enough with a third out there, and I've got too much to say on the one I started with.
Ok, it's sort of granted that one of the problems I have with Casshern is a convention that's often shows up in certain Japanese cinema, namely the anime-based stuff. I've seen it in a couple of other features, both animated and live-action. It's a kind of cinematic short hand. Having never looked into it far enough, I assume that there's an assumption that because the story already exists (either in novelized or in television series form), then there's no need for fully hashing out all the details. In the case of Casshern, the movie was based on a 70's animated series called Robot Hunter: Casshan (Shinzo Ningen: Casshan), though from what I can tell about the series (I know I've seen an episode or two at some point), the movie is fairly different. Still, this narrative style of sorts isn't quite enough for me to totally forgive some of the movie's faults.
For instance, we know that there's a war going on in the world, but we're never quite made to understand enough about the war, nor do we ever see enough of it to really understand how it's affecting this movie world (other than everything being dirty and industrial) because it's removed from the action. There is some explanatory exposition and some sporadic flashbacks, but it's never quite enough. Though this horrific reality molds and shapes everything about the story and it's characters, it's been left too far into the back ground. That's only for starters. The movie does move along pretty well for the first half hour, and the engagement does stem beyond just arresting visuals. Dr. Azuma, who we've gotten to know pretty well, appears close to completing his experiments when.....well, that's the problem, I'm not sure what to fill in the blank with.
The tubs that contain all the body parts are struck by some sort of metallic bolt of lightning. You know, the kind that comes out of nowhere with no explanation whatsoever. The kind that remains as some sort of symbol, not to mention the kind that turns mysterious body parts into a new kind of superhuman. Of course, by now, you realize that this is the same kind of that resurrects dead soldiers...well, only if they're the sons of the scientist whose tanks these are. From there it only gets clearer....(unfortunately there's not many ways to inject sarcasm into the printed page, however)...and boy does it look cool. (That actually wasn't sarcastic.)
Now like I said, a lot of this is by-the-books for animé stuff, but unlike some of the better written animé series or movies which take the time to at least hint at the mysterious goings-on (even if they never really explain it), this one just keeps sweeping by like a whirlwind. Additionally, things just keep happening to pop up to take care of the things that just happened to happen. For instance, for reasons unknown, our resurrected hero's body is going out of control because of the powers injected into when he was brought back to life. Not to worry though, because his girlfriend's dad just happens to have a cool body armor that will contain it...and...allow him to whoop @$$ at no extra cost. Ok, fine. Moving on. (There's a shot of the helmet Casshan/Casshern wore in the series which furthers my suspicions about this being plot-line shorthand since it's an obvious nod to the predecessor.)
Let's turn to our "villains." I put that in quotations because frankly...it's not really clear. What's funny is that in most of the reviews I've looked at for this film, everyone seems to think it's pretty obvious that the newly formed superhumans, "Neoroids" as they name themselves, are villains. This bothers me because I'm not sure that's what the movie was saying (not that I know what it was saying exactly). For one, when the Neoroids are slaughterd by soldiers as they escape Azuma's lab, it seems to be a pretty downbeat display. They're naked, dirty, frightened, and that's before they start getting mowed down. When they kidnap Azuma's wife (ok that's bad), there's a whole subplot about her bringing out their humanity. Oh, not to mention that our hero murdered the people who the regenerated body parts were made out of (who now reformed into the Neoroids, etc...see what I mean about this plot?). The weird part is that yes, in between this, they do perform some standardized villain-type bad stuff....hmmm...like attacking the "hero", and trying to wipe out most of humanity....Now wait a minute...
I've talked about the villains, but what about the "good" guys, or at the very least, every other character in the movie. Well there's the general and council who are shown as nothing but self-serving war-mongering old men. Then there's the general's son, who overthrows the council, but also turns out to be an immature and petty war-mongerer. There's Doctor Azuma who is really only trying to save his wife's eyesight with the cloned body parts which is kinda selfish and in this way is also feeding the war effort. Our hero, Casshern, ran off to fight in the war against his father's wishes, committed war atrocities, but who did get himself killed trying to save someone else. Only, upon his return, he basically just whoops @$$ against our too sympathetic villains, and the general's son's army whom we don't really care about anyway. In other words, nothing all that heroic. You could say "Well, he's trying to save the human race," but the only problem is that this dirty war-filled selfish nasty world doesn't seem worth saving. To be honest, I found the lead "villain" comparable to Roy Baty in Blade Runner...and in this case, it almost seeme like he would win. I would've cheered for him, except I knew that Casshern would inevitably still save the day.
But boy, it looked prety darn cool! And I'm absolutely serious. It did.
So the point seems to be something about man's inhumanity to man (or super-man) and something about scientific irresponsibility. In this case, I know a lot of this stems from philosophical strains that have filtered down through the generations and into the Japanese cinema as a result of events in World War II that the Japanese were responsible for (experimental atrocities against war prisoners) and that they were attacked by (nuclear weapons). Granted the series has wandered away quite a bit from it, but it's the same breeding ground that the original Godzilla was born in. The problem is that nothing about this movie is clear...and no, I don't think that was the point. The point seemed to be: Make it look cool. The rest seemed to be an attempt or a failed attempt to fit in all the other stuff.
Having confused themes, and grey area issues are not wrong in and of itself...but an adventure movie is not the place for them. Take Apocalypse Now. As a dramatic piece, it contemplates the horrors of war, the confusion of morality, and it's "hero" isn't much of a hero in the same way as say Hercules or James Bond is a hero. Imagine a Bond movie where the lines were all confused and bizzare, and you found Ernst Blofeld to be a more sympathetic character than Bond. Sure, you might appreciate the originality of it, but I doubt it'd be the entry that you liked the best. Even having a well rounded villain isn't a bad thing, in fact I appreciate it, but it doesn't work very well if your hero doesn't get the same consideration. What really does it here is that our "hero" has the look and would-be feel of a superhero, and we all know there's nothing grey area about Superman or Spiderman (at least not like this movie). Not that you can't do it, but it's got to be developed far better than this, if you're going to try. (If they were trying here, they didn't try hard enough.)
Thing is, for all the money, time, and effort that had to be poured into this movie, it almost seems a total waste because it only seemed to work in little pretty moments. However, pretty moments don't make me want to watch it again, nor would I recommend it to anyone (except as a curiosity. Bear in mind I love Fellini's Satyricon which I still can't satisfactorily explain, which I would recommend, but it was an artsy movie.). It needed a story first. A really good story. I think that there were the elements for one in there, but they needed to either be cleaned up or expanded upon to make them work better. Having said all this, I don't want to make it sound like artless trash. After all, if it was totally artless, I would have never finished watching it, or I would have only I would've been more annoyed. (Of course the flipside of that is if it was really really artless and artfully trashy, I would have enjoyed it more, but for all the wrong reasons.
So back to the point we started with: Visuals and special effects, particularly in this new breed of all digital movie, are still supposed to be tools of the story. No matter how realistic they may get, they don't take the place of a well-told story. The stop motion monsters in a Harryhausen movie may now look hokey as all heck, but as long as the stories are better, then I'll stick with the goofy monsters. Hopefully more people feel the same way about it...and eventually maybe the movies will begin to reflect that. Hopefully.
Cheers.
(P.S. I did like Sky Captain quite a bit. It was a little light on substance, but it made for an entertaining and cohesive story which was all it was trying for.)
No comments:
Post a Comment