Review: Dragonhead (????????
“What would you do when the world ends?”
That’s what the movie asks at least. Apparently the answer for the main character is: fall down a lot. That was his major characteristic, falling down. He did it over a dozen times in the first few minutes of the movie and continued to fall down throughout. It could make a liver challenging drinking game.
The premise of the movie is that the main character (along with several classes from his school,) is on his way to Kyoto from Tokyo. Suddenly there’s a blinding flash of light and tremors. The character wakes up an unspecified amount of time later to find the train near demolished and nearly everyone dead. This is where he starts falling down. Wait, I spoke to soon, apparently he survived the accident by falling down just at the right time.
We then follow him as he encounters a couple other survivors and they make their way out of the wreckage to find that Japan is an utter wasteland. Ash is everywhere. It is not entirely clear what has happened but at this point you can make a good assumption and be correct. The characters begin making their way towards Tokyo, by foot. They fall down several times.
What follows is a series of chapters each dealing with different locales or aspects of the devastation on the way to Tokyo. There are other survivors, though not many and it may be better if there were not. For some reason, the other survivors don’t seem to fall down as often.
The movie tries to explore different emotions presented in such a situation, hope versus despair, madness, fear. Conceptually it has a lot of promise, unfortunately it is very slow and drawn out in execution. Production value is high, acting is not bad but the direction needs help. This movie could have been wrapped up in a much tighter and poignant package if we didn’t spend half of it watching teenagers trip over themselves.
I haven’t read the original manga, but it does seem to capture the spirit, and I can easily see chapter delineations between scenes. It’s probably rather faithful, and that might be part of the reason it drags on so. Different mediums require different pacing. The end is open–as nearly any Japanese film is–but it does come to a close and we do finally know definitively what has caused all the destruction (though it’s been obvious for some time.)
I don’t recomend it unless you’re going to try and play the drinking game. In that case I recomend very weak drinks and a lot of them.
Notice: Undefined index: oid_skip in /var/www/vhosts/makesitgood.net/httpdocs/wp-content/plugins/openid/logic.php on line 1080
No Comments
» Leave one of your ownNo comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL
Leave a comment