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

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Extras
The Special Edition is a 2-disc set, with the extras delegated to disc 2.

Disc 1 autoplays with one of those ‘You wouldn’t parody this on the IT Crowd’ anti-piracy ads. Thank God they’ve stopped putting them on new DVDs, but they still come as a shock when you buy a back catalogue title.

The animated menus are horrible. They are the ones where you have to wait for your intended option to come around, and then pounce on the Enter button to select it. Fortunately there are only two options, Play and Chapter Select. A moron designed the Chapter Select screen. You only know if an option is highlighted when it becomes a micro-fraction of a shade brighter than the other options. I spent five minutes hitting buttons on my remote at random, and hoping that what I wanted would happen, before I realised that I was really was navigating around the screen.

Disc 2 offers similar wait and choose options, and since there are more of them, it’s twice as infuriating.

You get 34 minutes of Interviews on this disc; they are played sequentially in one big featurette, and feature many of the cast members, caught at various events as they EPK backslap about the film.

There are 12½ minutes of deleted scenes, 11 in total, but you can only see them overlaid with the director’s commentary. Since you can’t hear what is said in the scenes, it reduces their usefulness.

There are 12 minutes of 8mm footage, used in the film’s flashback sequences, here given a director’s commentary to add extra context. Since they are silent anyway, there’s no problem here with losing dialogue under the commentary.

Finally there are two trailers for the film.

Conclusion
Insert disc… suffer anti-piracy ad… select play… film starts… Mankind is scum… rinse and repeat for two hours and twenty minutes… film ends… eject disc… curl up in a ball somewhere and whimper. And that concludes the review of Casshern.

What a load of pretentious tosh! Casshern as an anti-war polemic is about as effective as an inarticulate scream. Yet that is all the movie appears to be, just one big rant about how destructive war is, and how stupid the people are who fight it. I was expecting something a little more rounded, a little more thought out, a little more entertaining. With a character like Casshern, I was expecting a superhero movie of some sorts, and while he does have an origin story that does seem to take as long as Superman’s did in that iconic 1978 movie, the pay off just isn’t there, with Casshern just reacting to events, and having as much personality resurrected as he did when he was a corpse.

You would also think that with the endless vistas open to the filmmakers, with the limitless possibilities of the digital backlot, that the film would be a visual feast, and there are moments in this film where the creative vision is breathtaking, the imagination brought to life on screen is simply astounding. But these moments are few and far between. Instead it seemed to me as if someone had taken a master chef’s ingredients, and given them to someone who didn’t know one end of a wok from the other. Everything is up there on the screen, but it looks a downright mess. So often I was distracted from what was happening in the foreground, by some artfully designed background, that I probably missed a good fraction of the narrative.

Unfortunately, the narrative isn’t that strong anyway, full of continuity head-scratchers, and relying on contrivance and sheer idiotic writing to keep the momentum of the film going. This is one of those stories where events happen because the story demands, not because it naturally progresses from what has occurred, or that it makes sense with the characters. Casshern works best as an extended metaphor. If you can accept being pummelled by an antiwar allegory, bludgeoned by its single-minded message, then it will probably serve you best to put the plot and the characters from your mind, and try and appreciate the somewhat confused visual grandeur. Briefly I saw this film as a silent movie, a cross between Battleship Potemkin and Metropolis, and for that moment I was enthralled by and engrossed in the imagery. Then the characters started speaking again, and the moment was lost.

Somewhere along the way, probably around Tim Burton’s Batman, someone decided that superhero movies needed to be dark, meaningful, and gritty. Which is all well and good, but for a time there, all superhero movies followed this template. Despite being a Japanese character, I think Casshern follows this closest of all. It’s so dark, depressing, po-faced, full of honourable intentions, focussed on the message, that it just forgets to be fun. Even the grittiest of Hollywood superhero flicks remembers to put a smile on your face from time to time. There’s none of that with Casshern. After watching this film, I’ve had Culture Club’s War Song stuck in my head. Imagine hearing, “War war is stupid and people are stupid, And love means nothing in some strange Quarters” for two hours twenty minutes, non-stop. You know, I think I’d prefer that to watching Casshern again. If you want to watch a movie where a soldier dies, and is resurrected to become a super fighting machine… watch Universal Soldier.

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