| Japanese pop literature is saturated
with apocalyptic stories. Even a cursory review
of the popular manga and anime universes reveals
an incredible proliferation of the genre—from
Akira
(1989) to Neon Genesis Evangelion to Macross.
Toho's live-action films are as chock-o-block
with apocalyptic visions as any other studio in
Japan, what with films like Gorath
(1962), Tokyo:
The Last Megalopolis (1987), and, to a
degree, Ghidorah,
the Three-Headed Monster (1964). As the
only country to ever be attacked with nuclear
weapons, Japan is, tragically, something of an
authority on apocalypses. I will admit right now
that I don't like apocalyptic movies. Even though
I am a Christian, I never got into the Left Behind
phenomenon, and as a general rule, I avoid dolorous
doomsday diatribes. However, being a genre film
nut, inevitably cinematic apocalypses explode
before my eyes on a fairly regular basis. Thus
I found myself popping in 2003's sci-fi offering,
Dragonhead. Unfortunately, no dragon heads
were to be found, but nihilistic Armageddon clichedom
certainly was.
High school student Teru Aoki (Satoshi
Tsumabaki, Water
Boys) is on his way home to Tokyo after
a school trip when something happens to the bullet
train he is riding and he blacks out. Upon awakening,
he discovers the train has crashed inside a collapsed
tunnel and that everyone around him is dead and
splashed with a dash or two of blood. Teru is
understandably upset, and he expresses this by
falling down a lot. He quickly discovers that
he was not the only survivor; fellow student Nobuo
(Takayuki Yamada, Train
Man) has also made it through the disaster,
although his mind has not. Nobuo, formerly the
butt of pranks and cruel teasing, has suddenly
become a homicidal maniac with a fetish for red
lipstick, and before long is painting kissy marks
all across his body. Teru, along with another
survivor—the requisite cute-and-helpless
young female, Ako (Sayaka—what is it with
Japanese celebrities and the lack of last names?),
find their way out of the tunnel and into a sprawling
world choked in death and ash. Even when they
do discover survivors, they would have been better
off alone; everyone seems to be violently insane,
with a penchant for sudden, cackling murder. With
hope running short, Teru and Ako cling to each
other and to a tenuous, desperate hope of returning
to Tokyo and some semblance of life.
Dragonhead, which is yet
another film based on a comic, is almost relentlessly
depressing. If something bad can happen, it usually
does, and then it usually gets worse. The story
is completely humorless, while parading the clichés
of a world gone mad across the screen even while
Teru and Ako somehow retain reasonable levels
of sanity. (Teru does go a little nuts in isolation,
but he never seems to be stricken with the "magnetic
imbalance" insanity that everyone else is
suffering from.) The disasters function like clockwork,
alternately saving our heroes from gun-wielding
wackos and menacing them with fiery death. Somehow,
as everyone else dies around them, Teru and Ako
only get a thick dusting of ash across their bodies.
It really seems like the entire earth itself is
out to kill everyone except the leads—at
one point, as Teru and Ako flee from a collapsing
building, giant rocks fall on the people around
them with incredible accuracy, almost as if they
were aimed that way. No wonder everyone is going
mad.
There are a few interesting novelties
in this film. A doctor, in trying to rescue his
children from the horrors of insanity, gives them
a lobotomy that robs them of all emotion, and
another group of survivors consume special brain-numbing
survival rations that reduce them into an almost
vegetable-like stupor. The film is trying to explore
what it means to be human, I think, and the drive
to survive—is survival means losing your
humanity, is it worth surviving? However, all
of this is accompanied by a lot of pseudo-philosophical
talk from the leads that is sometimes several
notches below convincing.
For all the angst and hogwash,
the acting isn't too bad. Satoshi Tsumabaki is
fairly credible as the distraught Teru, at least
when he isn't falling down all the time. I've
seen Tsumabaki in a number of roles, and in my
opinion he always gives a solid, workmanlike performance—but
nothing he has done has made me want to search
out his movies. Dragonhead doesn't change
that. Sayaka, as cliché-girl Ako, manages
to be cute even with ash covering her body, but
she isn't given much to do beyond squeaking and
clinging to Teru. Supporting actors tend to chew
the scenery while spouting melodramatic nonsense
like, "embrace the darkness." Basically,
they exist as a wicked contrast to Teru and Ako's
sanity, and are there to distract us from the
fact that our heroes don't really have much personality.
The music is much like most everything
else in the film—very forgettable. Most
of it is extremely simple, plodding stuff to underscore
how tragic everything is. As I listened, I couldn't
imagine someone enjoying this stuff outside of
the context of the film. It was there simply to
enhance mood, not to exist as credible music unattached
to Dragonhead. In my opinion, this is a
valid choice for the movie, although it doesn't
strengthen the movie very much.
The biggest highlight of the film
was the special effects, which isn't surprising
as Shinji
Higuchi, SFX maestro behind the 1990's Gamera
trilogy, helped design them. Dragonhead
creates a pretty credible wasted world, with huge,
bleak landscapes, and impressive ash-covered sets.
Some of the CGI work, which is used heavily on
backgrounds and to make the sky look menacing,
isn't very convincing and occasionally looks like
it would do better in a PlayStation 2 game, but
mostly it is done well. Some of the sequences
involving burnt corpses and ravaged buildings
strongly reminded me the horrors I saw at the
Peace Museum in Hiroshima, which is a testament
to their design.
Simply put, I don't like movies
like Dragonhead. I admire the look of the
film, and I acknowledge that the film is executed
competently and even has a few interesting ideas.
However, those good things are buried in the bad,
and, at least for this viewer, Dragonhead
is less dragon and more drag.
|
(2/5)