Jap Jappity Jap Jap
Written by Davey Gravy
When polled about the recent lapse in Dave and Dave related updates, 67% of people asked said they’d never head of Space Pirates, 48% said that they really couldn’t care less whether or not the little fuck ever showed his greasy little artsy fartsy ass ’round these parts anyhows dag nabbit, and 84% said “Who are you? What are you doing in my house, and where are your pants?” We here at Space Pirates Ltd. value our readers’ opinions highly and have well paid teams working ’round the clock to bring you the very latest in interweb technology to ensure that you can read our whiny, uninformed, quarter-assed articles at unfathomable speeds. You voted; now have your voices heard! Back by popular demand is another of Dave’s updates.
Since my initiation into the college environment, I have begun a nurturing path to greatness. I am enrolled at the Maryland Institute College of Art, better known by its aliases: MICA, Mary’s Cart, and Mist Co Fart. I recently made the decision to major in video, which yields such exciting careers as Blockbuster employee, high school tech guy, and astronaut. So, as you can probably imagine, I’m a bit of a pretentious fuck when it comes to watching others’ movies. I was recently suckered into watching a little ditty called Casshern.
The trailer initially drew me in. I only knew a few things from it. I knew it was live-action; I knew it wasn’t anime; I knew it featured an army of marching robots; I knew it wasn’t anime. Within the first 20 minutes I learned two things:
1. Never trust a foreign movie trailer with no subtitles.
2. Never ever trust Japan.
Apparently, a movie doesn’t have to feature approximately four recycled frames of animation coupled with twelve year old girls being raped by car parts to achieve the level of bad that anime always seems to. I frankly can’t make fun of this movie much more than it makes fun of itself, so I’m just going to describe it to you. Those of you who’ve always wanted to see a live-action anime and don’t want to suffer the little things like “plot” and “talent” invested in Kill Bill can buy this movie on DVD over the internet and stop reading this update now.
Now for the summary. Forgive me if I repeat myself, but most of this bears repeating anyway. Keep in mind, I went into this expecting a good movie.
Setting
The film introduces itself by revealing Japan’s secret plot to take over all of Europe and Asia to form one solidly Japanese continent called Eurasia, which was formed at the end of a war between The Eastern Continent and Europa. It’s never clearly explained where the movie takes place. I assumed Earth the whole time, considering all the names are based on continents and all the characters are humans, but according to the internet it takes place on another planet. I guess you’re supposed to assume it’s another planet because everything besides the actors themselves is clearly N64 quality CGI. All this information about the wheres and whens doesn’t matter however, as the fact that they’re on another planet is not only never mentioned, but has absolutely no bearing on the story one way or the other, so we’ll just say Earth for now.
Plot and Characters
The character lineup includes some guy doing stem-cell, er I’m sorry, “Neo-cell” research, his worthless get-kidnapped-by-zombies wife, his pisslicker I-get-killed-in-lots-of-wars kid, and the kid’s I-am-a-pointless-character fiancée. All of whom face a common enemy even more ridiculous than all of them put together. The scientist doing research on the Neo-cells (cells that can regenerate human parts) to help his wife who’s dying or something has for some inexplicable reason, a giant pit of glowing red goo in his lab that’s filled with body parts of dead POWs. So naturally, fifteen minutes into the movie when the “We’re at war” premise runs dry, the glowing red pit decides to spawn of bunch of zombies (because you know, that’s what happens to scientific experiments when they’re left lying around for too stupid of a movie, er, I mean too long) who rise out covered in gray goo, which I think you’re supposed to assume is their skin, but later isn’t anyway. So again, it really doesn’t matter.Once the zombies emerge, the humans immediately start shooting at them, even though they pose no threat. I’d go into detail about how ridiculous that in itself is, but it turns out that the leader of the zombies does that about 57 million times in the last half hour or so, so I won’t waste your time as mine was wasted. Some unimportant things happen, (I’m not kidding. The most important thing that happens is that the leader of the zombies tears down the Eurasian flag and wraps it around himself like a cloak. You’d think that’d be a really cool costume for the rest of the movie wouldn’t you? Apparently, the director didn’t, because later the flag magically turns into some hand-crafted armor and a flowing red spawn cape.) then the zombies kidnap the scientist’s wife and flee to the mountains, despite the fact that someone already clearly stated that bullets won’t kill them. Now, that seems hard to screw up, right? I mean, you’ve got your futuristic armies. You’ve got your kidnapped wife to save, and now you’ve got ZOMBIES! Surprisingly enough, they manage to. The zombies wander the mountains for a while until (and I’m not making this up) some clouds decide to part in front of them revealing a castle in the middle of the mountains. And what’s inside? Pfft. What else? Robots! It turns out, the castle is an abandoned robot army producing factory, that the Eurasians seem to not only have forgotten existed, but also forgot that they had that kind of technology. Silly Eurasians! Always building robot factories in the middle of nowhere and then forgetting about them. Keep that up and you’ll find yourselves sacked by a bunch of filthy Visigoths! I suppose you could say that since the movie is maybe/potentially/probably not supposed to take place on another planet, the robot factory could have been left there by some ambient alien life forms that decided to high-tail it long ago. Sadly, this explanation makes the most sense to me, despite the fact that it’s probably the stupidest.
There are some pointless montages (unless the point is to mask the fact that the makeup team was fired during this sequence) and the zombies cease to have haggard gray skin and begin to look like anime characters, right down to the waxed, colored hair and zany S&M-style costumes that, for sanity’s sake I’m just going to assume were in the storage closet of the robot factory. The leader of the zombies whom up until this point have made it apparent that none of them can talk proceeds to deliver a speech in fluent Japanese. “Let us henceforth be known as neo-sapiens,” he says, “And we have a new purpose: destroying humanity!” Thus far, approximately an hour and a half has gone by. The movie is nearly three hours.
In the meantime, the scientist decides to put his dead son in the red goo to bring him back to life, which I’d say is up there in the good idea department. I mean, if I’d lost a son in the war, the first place I’d want his body would be a pit that spawns zombies, or, sorry, “neo-sapiens.” But luckily, that doesn’t matter, since the only reason he’s brought back is that the director needed a protagonist and in his haste to get to the robot factory, he accidentally killed all the potential ones. The kid puts on some super mega smile-time action armor or something which makes him powerful enough to fight the robot armies that the neo-sapiens are using. Let me reiterate. The neo-sapiens, impervious to bullets, are a threat to humanity because they found some robots. That again doesn’t matter, because the fact that they’re impervious to bullets is forgotten later on in hope that we’ll be so confused at that point that it won’t even matter. Luckily for me, it didn’t.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: “What about the other two hours? Surely something important happened!” Important? Yeah, sure. The kid destroyed the robot army a few times in the anticlimactic style of Equilibrium, except unlike Equilibrium it looked like crap, and I didn’t care. A bunch of unimportant characters die, and you eventually find out that the neo-sapiens when they were still alive were people killed in the war to create Eurasia, which would be a really cool twist if
A. It made any fucking sense
B. It had anything to do with anything, which it didn’t.Some fighting happens, and like I said, the theme of “Humans killed us before we even did anything to them. We fought back. Maybe no one should fight anyone,” is repeated so many times, it makes me wish that the muppets in Labyrinth had told me not to take things for granted just a few more times. There also seemed to be an underlying theme that had to do with stem cell research; it was as follows: “If you do stem cell research, zombies will turn your secret robot armies against you.” And that, friends, is the last thing I want!
