20th Century Boys — movie review — screener!
I’ve seen a lot of great movies recently. Neill Blomkamp’s District 9, Jan Svankmajer’s Lunacy, The Quay Brothers’ Piano Tuner of Earthquakes, and even Chan-Wook Park’s I’m a Cyborg, but that’s Okay (not great, but still pretty good). These films got me totally jazzed. Coming off a rather long review hiatus, these films made me want to jump back into reviewing some offbeat cinema finds more than ever before. But then, as luck would have it, I encounter a film like 20th Century Boys, and near all my momentum and enthusiasm is lost again.
Based on a classic manga series of he same name, 20th Century Boys, has garnered Watchmen-like hype overseas, and shattered box office records previously established by Death Note. Furthermore, 20th Century Boys bears the hallmark of being one of Japan’s most expensive films ever. And to top it off, the film was directed by Yukihiko Tsutsumi, who also handled one of my favorite Japanese cult entries, 2LDK. These two components were more than enough for me to seek it out. But on watching the film, I was hard pressed to see where all that money (and talent) actually went. Certainly it wasn’t spent on effects, a collection of mid-90’s direct-to-video grade cg sequences, which comprise at most a mere 20 minutes of screen-time. Rather, I think the money was spent to meet another 2LDK/Dual-style dare: to prove to the world that the budget-conscious Japanese film industry could make something as proportionally expensive, and infinitely more vacuous than the most bombastic Michael Bay production.
Yes, 20th Century Boys is the rare film that is so incompetently paced, so ill-thought out, so objectively bad, that it maddens the viewer over the precious time spent watching it. And what a sizable waste it is. Clocking in at 2 hours and 20 minutes, 20th Century Boys somehow manages to feel even longer than this year’s super-heroic bore, Watchmen. Sure, it starts off well enough, with a setup echoing elements of Stephen King’s It: a group of adults find their childhood pact comes back to haunt them, thus requiring them to team up and battle an evil doomsday cult, whose leader just might happen to be a former member of their club. But lest I make it actually sound interesting, know that the film peaks 20 minutes in, trapping the viewer in a 2 hour free-fall as the film abandons all logic, plausibility, and potential for audience investment in its plummet toward celluloid hell.
20th Century Boys is padded liberally with interminable sequences of melodramatic overacting, random mugging at the camera, and general over-exposition. Similarly, the film is plagued by clumsy diversions into rock and roll fanboy-ism (one character gets his frustrations with the world out by playing a guitar solo, and inspires his comrades with speeches about Bowie), curiously vanishing secondary characters, main characters that are introduced halfway into the final act, inappropriate soundtrack music, wild shifts in tone (think going from CSI to Suicide Circle to Ponyo in the span of five minutes)…the list goes on and on. Sure, for the most part the film is shot competently (props to cinematographer Satoru Karasawa), but that doesn’t make up for the sheer lack of polish in near every other facet of the story. It’s worth noting that the script was hacked out by no less than four writers, but even then, you’d hope one of them could have seen the disaster they’d produced.
And you want to know the very worst part? 20th Century Boys is merely the first installment in a trilogy of films based on the manga. There’s far more pain to come.
Now, some of you fans might thing I’m being a bit harsh on the film, but to you I ask these questions: If you were the leader of a doomsday cult, and your plan’s success hinged on the kidnapping of an infant girl, would you give up after one attempt at abduction? Also, if a man is indeed supposed to have held up in a legitimately secret secret-hideout, and have done so for a period of multiple years, how do eight other characters coincidentally show up at exactly the same time, without his or each other’s prior knowledge? How does a city like Tokyo, after a series of worldwide terrorist incidents not notice the presence of TWO giant robots hell-bent on wrecking the city? Do you really expect me to believe that the aforementioned terrorist incidents could be attributed to one man without any evidence beyond the accusations of one powerful man? (okay, so maybe this is plausible. A commentary on the Iraq war, perhaps?). And lastly, where the hell did the fat twins go?
Gah. I’ve written too much. 20th Century Boys is quite possibly the most maddening film I’ve seen since Maiko Haaaan!!! (which, oddly enough, is another viz release), the film which first started my film-review hiatus. However, unlike Maiko Haaaan!!!, I actually made it through 20th Century Boys (even my Kou Shibasaki fandom couldn’t save that one). Still, it managed to kill my desire to watch films for close to two weeks now, even coming off the cinematic high of Inglourious Basterds, and that says something. 20th Century Boys is a 21st Century failure, one that may have to be seen to be believed, but one I recommend avoiding at all costs.
Bonus Trailer
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