DVD Review: Casshern
Casshern is a gorgeous film. It's visually stunning with bright vivid colors and amazing cinematography. Too bad it's boring as all hell. And confusing... very, very confusing. Though to be fair, perhaps that's only because I don't smoke the reefer. It's based on the Casshan anime, and although didn't care for too much for that one either, I thought it was still way better than this film. At least I could follow what was going on in the anime version. Oh, and not only was the timing was off on some of the subtitles (showing up too late, leaving too early, and not showing up at all in a few cases), but I even noticed a typo where they forgot to add a space between two words.
Well, enough stalling. S'pose it's time for me to attempt a summary. Okay, here it goes... we're told that a 50-year is finally ending. In this war, robots battled humans. Now that it's over, some scientist discovered some kind of super-duper stemcells which can grow into any organ and not be rejected by the body, but these cells are only found in people who are living in Sector 7... and thus are terrorists of some kind... and are called the original humans... but nobody will believe these people are humans, much less original humans... because they are terrorists. Got all that? Okay, now hang on 'cause it's about to get weirder.
The scientist is using those super-cells to harvest human organs such as arms, eyes, and whatnot in a giant red pool. Then a giant lightning bolt (the cartoon-shaped kind, not the realistic kind) comes out of the sky and strikes the pool... except that the lightning bold is now made of some kind of metal blocks or something... and this causes the organs in the red pool to assemble into bodies who then proceed to get up and walk away. Guards are called in to kill all these bodies, but a few escape.
The few who escape apparently stumble upon a giant castle of some sort. Inside, we see that it's more like an old abandoned factory, supposedly one that produced the robots for that 50-year war. So about 5 seconds later, the escapees (who call themselves neo-humans) somehow managed to fix up the building good as new, grab brand new clothes, obtain a ginormous new robot army, and head out for revenge against the humans for trying to kill them.
Okay, now let me back up a bit. In the beginning of the movie we meet a young man who is a doctor and has a fiancee, but instead of staying home to help the good of all and do the nasty, he decides to go to war and kill people. And he dies there. His body is brought back for burial, and that's when the whole weird lighting bolt thing happens. So daddy puts his son's body in the red pool, which not only brings him back to life but gives him super-human powers. Daddy then puts him in a tube and gives him a super-suit so he won't explode or something.
When the neo-humans start their whole revenge thing, they try to kidnap daddy because he's a foremost expert on armor or something. But he mildly resists and so they kill him. But during this whole thing sonny boy is accidently released from his tube. He can barely stand, yet he shows off strength that superman would be jealous of. And then there's this awesome looking battle sequence in which he kicks serious butt... and he somehow knows how to use all the weapons on his suit... and he somehow knows how to do all these cool kickass moves. All this from a guy who could barely stand 5-seconds ago.
Then I really got lost after this part, so I really couldn't tell ya what happens next. But the style was just so cool. It was filmed completely with green screens, so the only real things in the movie were the actors. Other movies have done this kind of thing, like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Sin City, and 300, and it really does work here. But it was just so confusing, which in turn made it very boring. It's just too bad they couldn't have spun a yarn that could be followed by any normal un-baked person. Ah, and no extra features to speak of either.
