Casshern: Special Edition (Review)
Tuesday, 16th February 2010, 16:21

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Introduction
Casshern may not mean too much to the average man in the street, especially in the UK, but he’s definitely an item of pop culture in Japan, up there with any of the Marvel Comic characters. The creator, Tatsuo Yoshida isn’t a name that will ring too many bells here either, but he’s the man who also created Speed Racer, and Gatchaman, better known in the West as Battle of the Planets. So you can see why Casshern was ripe for a live action adaptation back in 2004, over 30 years after he first appeared in anime form. 2004 was also the year of the digital back lot, that brief flirtation with egregious CGI used in filmmaking that was thankfully short-lived. The US gave us Revenge of the Sith, Sin City, and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, and Europe gave us Immortel. Stand your actors in front of a green screen, give them a rough idea of what they are supposed to do, and then colour in the backgrounds afterwards, and audiences can marvel at characters that don’t interact with anything. It’s a useful filmmaking tool, but you really shouldn’t make a whole movie that way. But no one knew that back in 2004, which is why Japan gave us Casshern, essentially real life actors inserted into a 3D anime.

In the future, following a protracted and devastating war between East and West, peace finally reigns when the Eastern Federation wins. But this is no glorious peace, for the war has wrought havoc on the world, pollution and decay now permeates everything, and far from ending the fighting, now the government has to face terrorism as well. Humanity is tired, dispirited, and dying, for the pollution takes its toll, and mutations weaken the gene pool. One man has hope, Dr Azuma’s neo-cell treatment offers life instead of death, and he hopes to heal his stricken wife when the technology is developed. As so often happens, the only faction willing to support his work is the military. He has his own problems when his son Tetsuya refuses to follow him into medicine, and instead joins the military to make his mark, before coming back to marry his childhood sweetheart Luna. But tragedy strikes when Tetsuya is killed. Worse, Dr Azuma’s experiments go horribly wrong, creating a new life form, the Neoroids, who are intent on exterminating their creators, and who kidnap Azuma’s wife. His only hope is to use the neo-cell treatment to resurrect his fallen son, and transform him into the hero Casshern.

Picture
Momentum Asia gives us Casshern’s 2.35:1 picture in the anamorphic format, although it is one of those pesky NTSC-PAL standards conversions. It isn’t that bad, with ghosting and the like at a minimum. There is a smidgen of interlacing, and they seem to have gotten around the innate softness with a touch of edge enhancement. Otherwise, Casshern is clear and sharp throughout, and as for the colours, I think they invented a couple of new ones for this movie. Casshern is bright, it’s hyper-real, it’s as if they threw everything at the screen and hoped that some of it would stick. There’s a mish-mash of styles in the filming, with stark monochrome for the flashback war sequences, brilliant colours for the present day, moments of intense clarity, scenes saturated with deliberate grain, different colour schemes, different lighting effects… The same goes for the production design, which mixes the post-apocalyptic with the post-industrial, throws some art deco at the screen, maybe some steampunk. It is a visual menagerie that really needed someone to just put their foot down and say ‘pick one’. And I thought the lens flare on the recent Star Trek movie was bad… Yeesh!

Sound
No choices here, just a DD 5.1 Japanese surround track, with English subtitles. You can’t select the subtitles from the menu, and the only way to turn them on and off is directly with your remote control. The dialogue is clear and the surround is vibrant and effective in conveying the film’s many action sequences.

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