Freesia — Genghis Khan: To the Ends of the Earth and Sea — movie reviews

by Chris   ⋅   August 11, 2008   ⋅   Comment now   ⋅    RSS

So, I figured some of you guys might be wondering what’s going on with our coverage of Japanese films. Well, I’ve got you covered. Read on for brief reviews of Freesia and Genghis Khan: To the Ends of the Earth and Sea.

Freesia: Icy Tears (aka: Freesia: Bullets over Tears) . It’s the old samurai-western feedback-loop, but with a dash of Sci-Fi for good measure. In Freesia’s near-future Japan, all litigation has been eschewed in favor of hands-on acts of vengeance. Persons expressing a grievance are assigned a posse of professional killers by the state, and allowed to take on their target in the closed streets of their own town. The defendant is afforded a single bodyguard, and a pat on the back. The victor retains not only their life, but good standing within society. Enter Hiroshi Kanou (Tetsuji Tamayama), a killer struck numb to the world –lacking even a sense of pain — after surviving a secret government test of an advanced Freeze-Bomb as a young military cadet. When a series of military officials responsible for the original Fenrir test come under fire of the Vengeance act, including Hiroshi’s old supervisor, Hiroshi finds himself torn between duty, loyalty, and plain, old-fashioned justice.

For an action film, Freesia boasts a surprisingly subdued, meditative storyline. In fact, many of the sequences involve silent long takes, using background action as a window into the mind of the subject of the scene. These sequences also boast some impressive cinematography, lending a sense of beauty and the surreal to even the most mundane events — my favorite being a sequence depicting Hiroshi eating a plate of spaghetti in a quiet restaurant, oblivious to the actions of the fascist police force, forcibly suppressing a peaceful protest outside. Action sequences are intriguing as well, infused with something of a Metal Gear Solid feel, with weaponry grounded firmly in reality and combatants whose skills who belong completely to the realm of fantasy. Tsugumi (Noriko’s Dinner Table, Exte: Hair Extensions) gives one of her best performances to date, while Tamayama delivers a suitably wooden one (not a bad thing, given his character’s numbness). Freesia may not be a film that you will remember too far down the line, but the skill behind its production will keep your attention from start to finish.

Genghis Khan: To the Ends of the Earth and Sea . Even if your tastes tend to favor the mainstream, you’ve probably heard something about a recent, amazing cinematic take on the life and times of Genghis Khan. To the Ends of the Earth and Sea is not that film. This made for television Mongolian/Japanese co-production lacks the star power, dramatic scope, and artistic finesse of Sergei Bodrov’s Mongol, instead offering elementary-grade education as relayed through pop-stars. Seriously, this film plays like a grade-school class-play, the likes where everyone receives a part regardless of talent or understanding. Lines are muttered without the slightest notion of motive or emotion. Reactions to those are devoid of both comprehension and consequence. Actors stare blankly, smile, and pose prettily in their impossibly clean nomadic garb. It’s epic only in its incompetence.

But let’s pretend we could ignore the bargain basement acting. How does the film fare when evaluated as an educational biopic? While education seems undeniably to be the primary goal of To the Ends of the Earth and Sea, the ways in which it goes about its insultingly facile. At best the film provides a basic overview of Temujin’s (Genghis Khan’s given name) rise to rule, with all the detail and insight one could expect from a two-paragraph subsection in a world history book. Characters are reduced to cardboard cutouts, going about their motions without any real rhyme or reason. Temujin himself appears a little too succeptible to outside suggesstion to hold any chance of being a respectable world leader– much less conqueror. In fact, if the film were to be believed, the main impetus behind Khan’s campaign to unite the various Mongolian tribes was merely that a childhood friend thought it would be nice for the tribes to be one, and young Temujin thought it a swell idea as well. Even as a piece of educational fluff, this Genghis Khan fails.

I could go on – and believe me, there are many many more things to rip apart regarding this film – but I feel I’ve wasted enough of my time on it already. Skip this one at all costs.

About the Author

Chris Nelson has been a film fanatic for as long as he can remember. A former film and English major, he is now a Software Engineer and contract Technical Writer living in the Silicon Valley.

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