| Lorelei: The Witch of the
Pacific Ocean is the directorial debut of
one Shinji
Higuchi. Now Higuchi is truly a man of many
talents. When he wasn't creating some of the coolest
special effects in the Japanese film industry
with his work on Shusuke
Kaneko's Gamera trilogy (with just a fraction
of the budget of the Heisei Godzilla films, no
less) and other live action films, he was doing
impressive storyboard and animation work on such
Gainax anime titles as Gunbuster, Nadia
and Neon Genesis Evangelion. With Lorelei,
Higuchi makes the jump from special effects director
extraordinaire to full fledged director with this
adaptation of novelist Harutoshi Fukui's massive
novel Shusen no Lorelei. To be blunt,
I expected far better than this film from a man
of Higuchi's talent. I'm actually kind of torn.
I really like the filmmaking style of the movie,
CGI aside, and find it quite entertaining and
engrossing; however, I find its message and right
wing slant a hard pill to swallow.
In terms of the story, it's the
end of World War II and Little Boy has just been
dropped on Hiroshima. Lieutenant Commander Masami,
a sort of renegade commander who has been ostracized
by the higher ups due to his opposition to Japan's
various suicide tactics, along with a misfit crew
is put in charge of the submarine I-507 by military
officer Asakura and ordered to stop Fat Man from
being dropped on Nagasaki. The submarine is a
gift from the Nazis to the Japanese and possesses
a secret weapon called the "Lorelei System",
at the core of which is a young girl named Paula,
who was modified by the Nazis to be kind of a
human sonar system. However, the I-507 is too
late and the bomb is soon dropped. Consequently,
Asakura decides to surrender to the Americans
and give the Lorelei System to them and they will
in turn drop a third atomic bomb on Tokyo. Masami,
however, disobeys orders and decides to take the
I-507 and it's crew to Tinian on a suicidal mission
to take down the plane carrying the third bomb.
While Lorelei is a highly
entertaining film, the politics of it just don't
sit right with me. The whole kamikaze attitude,
that one should sacrifice their own life for the
glory of their nation, is glorified in this film
with Masami and his crew in the end deciding to
sacrifice their lives for the future of Japan.
Unlike in Wolfgang Petersen's U-boat epic Das
Boot where the submarine crew are basically
just normal people following orders, the Japanese
crew in this film are very much fighting for the
glory of their country. Don't get me wrong, the
atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were
truly terrible and tragic events, but they were
a last resort and actually cost far fewer lives
than "Operation Downfall", the full
scale invasion of Japan that General MacArthur
planned, would have. In another very interesting
example, the film has a subplot involving human
experimentation by the Germans yet completely
glosses over the fact that the Japanese army,
while stationed in Northern China, operated what
was known as Unit 731 where they performed experiments
on Chinese, Russian and even some Allied prisoners
that are too horrific to mention here; in fact,
they even sickened some visiting German scientists
and are documented in both the 1987 Hong Kong
production Men Behind the Sun and in
the upcoming Philosophy of a Knife. That
said, the American characters in this film are
treated rather fairly, not as buffoons at all.
Technically, though, the film is
excellent and is quite an entertaining two hours,
though the special effects are actually kind of
disappointing considering that this is a Higuchi
film. Higuchi managed to nicely balance the analog
and digital worlds with his work on the three
Gamera films, but here he relies far too much
on digital effects and not on good, old fashioned
(and better looking) miniatures, with the submarines
and warships being computer generated, not entirely
convincingly I might add. Still, even if the special
effects aren't all that realistic, there are some
particularly eye popping vistas, many resembling
such anime as Nadia: Secret of Blue Water
(which Higuchi himself worked on) and Blue
Submarine No. 6. Indeed, the film does have
a heavy anime vibe, which is not surprising considering
Higuchi's roots with Gainax. Lt. Commander Masami's
wardrobe even resembles that of a kind of WWII-era
Captian Gloval from Macross. Higuchi's
direction is good, the film's cinematography,
particularly of the submarine's claustrophobic
interiors, is excellent and the film's digital
color grading is done quite decently and tastefully,
unlike the tacky color filters that plague a certain
movie by the name of Godzilla:
Final Wars (2004).
The acting is one of the best aspects
of the film. Koji
Yakusho (from Tampopo
and Shall
We Dance and most recently in Babel)
is absolutely superb as Lt. Commander Masami as
are most of the other actors, particularly Jun
Kunimura (Boss Tanaka in Kill Bill).
Satoshi Tsumabuki and Yu Kashii are merely okay
as the young leads. For once, the American actors,
in what is surely a rarity in Japanese fantasy
cinema, are actually competant, professional actors
and not gaijin pulled off the streets. The film
is not without its glaring flaws, however, as
the music by Naohiro Sato did not impress me.
At worst it sounds like video game or bad anime
music, at best it sounds like a rip-off of Hans
Zimmer's body of work (particularly his Gladiator
and Pirates of the Caribbean themes).
The film also suffers from a number of plot holes,
which isn't surprising considering Fukui's novel
was over a thousand pages long and the film version
of it clocks in at just over two hours, particularly
bizarre is the character of Asakura's motivations:
he sends the I-507 to stop the bombs from hitting
Japan and then basically states that he had planned
for the bombs to hit all along.
In terms of character development,
namely the development of Masami, one film that
Lorelei makes an interesting comparison
to is Ishiro
Honda's classic Atragon
(1963). Both Captain Jinguji in Atragon
(1963) and Lt. Commander Masami are submarine
commanders, but they have almost opposite character
arcs. Jinguji at first still believes in the might
of the Japanese Empire, but then has a change
of heart and decides to use his submarine for
the good of mankind. Masami, on the other hand,
when we first meet him, is basically a renegade
because he opposed the Japanese military's numerous
suicide missions, but in the end decides to take
his submarine on such a mission to save Japan.
Commander Asakura, however, is a very poorly developed
character with his motivations making no sense
whatsoever.
Overall, it's a decent and entertaining
piece of filmmaking with some flaws, but it loses
a point or two due to its dubious political statements.
|
(3/5)