Casshern
Oh lord. If you can get someone to strip an hour or two out of this abortion, then watch it for the awesome visuals. Looking further into the title, it seems it was based on a 70’s anime. Now, this will be tough to believe, but the anime storyline actually makes ten-thousand percent more sense. There are spoilers here, so don’t read on if you care.
What the crap man. Here’s what I could figure out about Casshan, the anime- Pollution is killing the plants, so Dr. Azuma builds robots to… somehow… protect and presumably encourage plant life. Their leader decides that eliminating the humans is the only long term solution, and Azuma’s son turns himself into a cyborg so he can take on the robots.
Nice, simple-ish, and with at least the potential for some meaningful moral tension.
The movie, despite receiving nothing but blowjobs from the public, breaks down into almost totally insensible crap.
There’s some war going on… some ethnic purging… so on. Dr. Azuma is researching Neo-Cells… which are like stem cells but apparently grow tentacles, and can be used to create tissues which will adapt to any host, avoiding rejection. So far, so good. His son runs off to the war, to do the patriotic thing. His wife is dying from the Industrial Disease, which is presumably what drives his research, though the connection is a little tenuous, but hey, I can let some vagueness slide for the sake of entertainment. His son dies, though his spirit seems to still be running around.
Some soldiers are bringing his body, for whatever reason, to the same place as Dr. Azuma’s lab. Lightning strikes, burrowing down into the lab, where a pool of Neo-Cell tissues are being kept. The lightning solidifies into a sort of zigzag pillar. Yeah… ok, I can let that slide too. The tissues start pulling themselves together, whole people crawl out, and start being shot down by guards. Eventually several of them make it out, dragging Azuma’s wife along, because she showed concern for one of their wounded.
The son, Tetsuya, is carried into the Neo-Cell vat by his father, and is brought back to life. He’s all superhumanly jacked up now, like the Neo-Sapiens, so another scientist drops him into a pressure cooker which grows armor around him, in order to “prevent him from tearing himself apart”. Whatever dudicus. So far, I’m still forgiving and enjoying this.
The Neo-Sapiens trudge into some high assed, snowy mountain range, where they find a castle filled with robots and robot factories. Now, looking into it, this is related to the original show. That aside, it didn’t make any sense in the context of this story. Not at any single point. Ever. Still, I let it go, but my eye began to wander some, and disbelief was beginning to seep back in.
Eventually bad guys cause Tetsuya to be released from the pressure cooker, and he kicks some robot ass. Like that, I’m ready to forgive, because these scenes are fantastic.
Bunch of crap happens on all fronts, and now I’m skipping about 6 hours into the movie. Turns out that the Neo-Sapiens are reformed villagers, killed by the soldiers, Tetsuya included. And everyone indicates that Dr. Azuma’s research never produced his magic cells. So… why the fuck do all these guys have super powers then? Not to mention just getting up from being dead AND dismembered. There’s some vague bullshit symbolism which you _could_ take as divine interference, but fuck that, it’s just lazy and amateur writing. We also get to see some plants, which are hyper important to the anime storyline but are completely unrelated to the movie story.
Finally, the last Neo-Sapien releases the Metal Gear, I mean… a giant construct with missiles, cannons, and a nuclear bomb. Which makes as much sense as anything by this time. Around this point you’ve heard no less than 8 speeches about how war is wrong, and that you shouldn’t hurt people different than you. Not strung out through the film either, but almost back to back.
So, Tetsuya tries to stop the bomb from going off and fails. He lives, somehow, and so does his chick Luna, somehow. His father shows up, to take his dead wife (Industrial Disease got her), but Tetsuya won’t let him resurrect her “because of all the suffering caused by his coming back”. What? All homie did was kill robots and 4 people killing civillians, mostly with robots. Yeah, awesome logic there super-fuckup. Anyway, his dad shoots Luna. She survived a ground zero atomic weapon, but apparently bullets are her weakness. I can’t even remember if Tetsuya kills him, that’s how retarded this shit got. Anyway. Luna gets back up because her Neo-Cells activate. Yeah, re-read that and don’t ask me to explain. The writer couldn’t, so I have no chance. So, they hug, and the souls of the dead on the battlefield rise up and boil them into nothing.
Then there’s a 20 minute montage of people running around being happy.