"We hurt others by our very existence. That's just the way we live. We need to learn to forgive. Need to realise that existence is to be shared. We're not just here to exist, but to find the strength to co-exist. It may start from something small, it may even seem impossible. But we must start from somewhere."
This is both a rather simple film and enormously elaborated upon in almost every aspect. It is the 'dark and gritty reimagining' of a 1970s anime TV show (and a 1993 anime film), which unfortunately I have not seen to contrast against. I am assuming that this film is doing the equivalent of turning Astro Boy into a genocidal maniac! I wonder how it was received in Japan? Eventually this film is as much to do with a very contemporary to 2004 anti-war message about the dangers of unnecessary warfare and ethnic cleansing coming back to bite the aggressor on the home front. We begin in a world where "after fifty years of war the Eastern Federation has beaten Europa's armies and taken control of the Eurasian continent. But pockets of resistance remain, threatening the new regime. The military mobilises again. Again families must lose their sons..." and then follow Dr Azuma and his family as they find themselves at the centre of the conflict and get torn apart by it and their conflicting responses to what is occurring.
Dr Azuma is doing research into 'neo-cells', which can regenerate body parts and hopefully will (instead of ending conflict) allow soldiers to replace any lost or destroyed body part with a new one, making fear of being crippled or mutilated a thing of the past, at least for those looking on and not experiencing it themselves. Whilst his presentation goes poorly he does get noticed by the ailing elderly General Kamijo, who rules the society, and afterwards gets approached by the man from the Defence Ministry who likes the idea as a replacement for armour (after all what is the point in protection when you could quickly replace body parts at a lower cost?). However Dr Azuma is really focused on doing his research because his wife is steadily losing her sight, and already is almost blind. So he enters into a deal with the Devil with the Ministry to gain access to a specialist laboratory and body parts no questions asked in order to speed up his research massively. In the meantime Dr Azuma's son Tetsuya has decided that he cannot stand by during a conflict and decides to go to war despite the protestations of Dr Azuma and leaving his new fiancee Luna behind to worry about him.
One year later Tetsuya is on the battlefield introduced ethnically cleansing a remote village. His commanding officer is delighting in getting another rookie soldier to shoot a faceless woman in the head, and is threatening to shoot him instead, when Tetsuya steps in to just shoot her anyway, which meets with the CO's approval. He is traumatised, which is not helped soon afterwards by picking up an orphaned baby that turns out to be attached to a hand grenade and being killed for his attempts to regain some humanity. Meanwhile Dr Azuma is deep in his research and has invited Luna's father, the armour specialist Dr Kozuki, to his lab to reveal his progress, leaving Luna to wait in the lobby. Tetsuya's mother Midori receives the news of his death on the battlefield, though not before having a brief reunion with him as a ghost.
This is all intercut with each other in a beautiful flowing rhythm, all building to the point where a deus ex machina literal thunderbolt comes out of the sky and strikes directly into the heart of Dr Azuma's protoplasmic body part gene pool in his laboratory. This 'somehow' is the magic ingredient that causes all of the body parts to knit themselves back together and come to life Frankenstein-style, as dozens of reanimated (and fully conscious) bodies rise out of the pool to come face to face with their creator. Most of them are immediately shot down by the military but a few manage to escape through the waste sewage pipes (that has a sea of bodies floating through it) to make their escape. This unfortunately (but beautifully) coincides with both Tetsuya's body being brought to the front entrance of the lab in a state procession and their mother arriving to view it. The mother is kidnapped by the 'Neo-sapiens', as they come to be called, and Dr Azuma pushes the mourning Luna away from the coffin, drags Tetsuya's corpse inside (all being watched over by Tetsuya's spirit begging him not to bring him back) and baptises him in the protoplasmic pool to bring him back to life. He then entrusts Tetsuya's body to Dr Kozuki and Luna to keep him safe and hide him away from the military (Dr Kozuki building him an armoured suit in the process, though the film pointedly destroys the iconic 1970s headpiece and dirties up the pure white suit of the figure with dirt and streaks of blood), so that he can go and save Midori.
That first half hour is so well constructed and just flows one situation into another, that it is a little disconcerting when the pace changes to a lower gear after the escape of the Neo sapiens and their trek through the wilderness to an abandoned castle that just happens to hold the remnants of a robot army within it. The Neo-sapiens start planning an all out war to destroy humanity entirely from that point (appropriating a very stylised swastika-esque flag as their symbol) and almost completely bring the society to its knees. There is a bit of political infighting as General Kamijo and his entourage are overthrown en masse by Kamijo's son. Unfortunately it is not going to end well for anyone involved, as tit-for-tat conflict destroys the entire world.
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For all of its focus on action in the trailers for the film, this is very much a war drama and a film about family ties being tested beyond breaking point. The whole situation is created by Dr Azuma trying to save his wife's sight. The head of the Neo-sapiens is driven in his vengeance at first for the brutal treatment faced by the soliders shooting his brethren down during their re-birth and escape (being immediately betrayed by his 'father'), but who eventually learns that he has deeper reasons for vengeance. Our nominal hero, Tetsuya, takes on the name of Casshern ('guardian angel') after his own re-birth but is an incredibly flawed identification figure, having literally committed a war crime in his past and been involved in ethnic cleansing activities.
The society we are seeing being destroyed seems like a terrible war-like one, but at the same time the Neo-sapiens are the literal antagonists of the film, wanting to destroy everything and going on giant robot rampages. Neither side has the moral high ground, and its all a murky swamp of conflicted loyalties. The female characters are the more sympathetic ones with Midori, the kidnapped mother, herself touching the heart of the Neo-sapiens with the loss of her son perhaps fuelling her grief for the losses on both sides and begs for them to end the conflict, unsuccessfully.
Anyway the situation gets quite neatly and ironically tied up in the final revelations that:
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the Neo-sapiens were reformed out of the body parts of the rounded up, murdered and dismembered civilians from the distant "Eurasian Zone 7" location that Tetsuya committed his war crimes in. Which immediately adds an edge to the film of the individual war crimes being something that almost inevitably grows out of a wider political situation 'allowing' such a thing to occur. We even find out in an expansion of the earlier flashback that the faceless woman that Tetsuya shot was the wife of the leader of the Neo-sapiens, killed in front of him before he himself was shot. So no wonder that character was fuelled by blind burning hatred for much of the film especially against the, rather blithely clueless as to his backstory until those final moments, main character! Both the hero and villain were 're-born' but still have the legacy of their actions in their previous lives hanging over them. (A similar premise in a strange way to the Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren film Universal Soldier!)
And then we get the revelation by the son of General Kojima that his father has not just been using body parts created by war to meet his own ends, but had actually been (like Dr Azuma in many ways) actively fuelling the decades long conflict in order to provide the body parts that his researchers would have needed to try and find some way of prolonging his own life. Or as the son puts it: "using national policy to meet medical needs". That is a subplot that feels a lot like the ancient father-young daughter conflict in the later Prometheus where what seems to be a noble effort for the wider good turns out to have been a very selfish attempt to prolong a life beyond its natural span no matter who suffers instead.
That actually makes overthrowing the old General and his cabal not seem quite as callous as the bloody 'assassination at the dinner table' scene made it appear! But the son is not particularly acting in altruistic interests either, more just has reached a breaking point himself and has tired of his father's longevity!
Which are really the main themes of the film: parents and children. Children losing their parents. Children betraying their parents only to learn that their parents betrayed them a long time before, usually at the point of their birth. Parents unable to protect their spouses or children from violence. The noble hero being a war criminal pressed unwillingly into service as a saviour. The noble scientist being pragmatic to a selfish degree. The longsuffering wife and fiancee being able to do nothing but cry and die to provide a lesson in humility. For all its sci-fi garb, this is really a very thinly veiled film about war and war crimes and how it is impossible to maintain a clear distinction between violence committed 'over there' and back at home.
And then we get the revelation by the son of General Kojima that his father has not just been using body parts created by war to meet his own ends, but had actually been (like Dr Azuma in many ways) actively fuelling the decades long conflict in order to provide the body parts that his researchers would have needed to try and find some way of prolonging his own life. Or as the son puts it: "using national policy to meet medical needs". That is a subplot that feels a lot like the ancient father-young daughter conflict in the later Prometheus where what seems to be a noble effort for the wider good turns out to have been a very selfish attempt to prolong a life beyond its natural span no matter who suffers instead.
That actually makes overthrowing the old General and his cabal not seem quite as callous as the bloody 'assassination at the dinner table' scene made it appear! But the son is not particularly acting in altruistic interests either, more just has reached a breaking point himself and has tired of his father's longevity!
Which are really the main themes of the film: parents and children. Children losing their parents. Children betraying their parents only to learn that their parents betrayed them a long time before, usually at the point of their birth. Parents unable to protect their spouses or children from violence. The noble hero being a war criminal pressed unwillingly into service as a saviour. The noble scientist being pragmatic to a selfish degree. The longsuffering wife and fiancee being able to do nothing but cry and die to provide a lesson in humility. For all its sci-fi garb, this is really a very thinly veiled film about war and war crimes and how it is impossible to maintain a clear distinction between violence committed 'over there' and back at home.
I remember this being an astonishing technical feat at the time, coming out a year or so after Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, and whilst a lot of the CGI has dated now everything is stylised to such an extent that it still feels strange and memorable. The CGI is really being used for any enormously wide shot (plus anything involving the giant robot army naturally!) and rather than having everything on a green screen 'digital set' there are actually a lot of built sets too, which perhaps tellingly are often the most beautiful and evocative parts of the film: the full of greenery garden which the blind mother is in at the beginning; Luna's armour specialist father's red-tinged home; the rusty brown of the Doctor Azuma's laboratory; the golden lobby that Luna falls asleep on the chair whilst waiting in; the black and white open forum area in the distant town in "Eurasian Zone 7" where the big fight scene gets set; the grand locations of lecture theatres and opulent dining rooms used for the political shenanigans and forcible transferences of power, and so on. That actually only emphasises more both the importance of those physical sets but also the colour scheme of the film where different areas get hugely contrasted together. There are a lot of moments where a number of different subplots occurring in different areas are being intercut with each other, and the quick back and forths but also that extreme change in visual looks seems to be trying to underline a kind of 'together but damningly separate' aspect to a lot of the action. I particularly get struck by the scene two-thirds of the way through the film which cuts between Casshern fighting against one of the Neo-sapiens Barashin in the black and white town setting, the yellow tinged exterior of the cattle truck, Holocaust style train that Luna and one of the other Neo-sapiens has been spirited away on in the interim (that is blue inside, the better to emphasise the clinical nature of this vehicle that is used to gather up civilians of particular ethnicities and cut them up into parts for people like Doctor Azuma (or purely just for Doctor Azuma's benefit?) to experiment upon); that is all overlaid by the speech occurring in another location of the new leader of the country declaring his new militarist intentions for his country, amping up the 'terrible evil' they face and preparing the nation for a fight like no other.
I also really liked that scene between Luna and Tetsuya on the way to the village, which itself keeps cutting between a tender discussion of the nature of tit-for-tat killing and their love for each other being powerless and a more intense and emotional take of the same scene, as if to suggest the emotions roiling away under the surface. This is a very 'busy' film, both visually and in the editing pattern where two or three scenes are happening simultaneously and commenting on each other by the way that are cut back and forth between to create a contrast, so it is very interesting to see just your standard young lovers moment being treated in exactly the same way.
There is a bit of a Russian brutalist feel to a lot of the visual designs, as well as a quite obvious nod to Fritz Lang's Metropolis in the moment of Tetsuya in the final fight against the giant clockwork robot at the climax involving trying to keep two hands of a giant clock from coming together in a nuclear detonation at midnight.
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Oh, and the inexplicably convenient deus ex machina thunderbolt that initially appears out of nowhere to bring life to the Neo sapiens eventually at the end of the film (in a beautiful moment that ties all the characters, from both sides of the conflict, together as one) becomes a (spoiler) beam of pure energy crossing the universe to thud into the protoplasmic pools of genetic material in the still not yet fully formed Earth. So we are apparently all descendants of those people who destroyed their world through conflict, in danger of repeating all of their mistakes over and over again in the same cycle. (Weirdly a bit similar to the surprise ending of Mario Bava's Planet of the Vampires!)
It is also quite a star studded production: Yûsuke Iseya had previously starred in Hirokazu Kore-eda's Distance and was the character who refused to choose their experience to inhabit in After Life before Casshern, and would go on the Memories of Matsuko and Takashi Miike's 13 Assassins after. He also even turns up Fernando Mereilles' 2008 adaptation of Blindness as the first victim of sight loss.
Kumiko Asô who plays Luna was the girl suspicious/jealous of Sadako in Ring 0: Birthday, was the lead in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse and was in Shohei Imamura's Dr Ikagi as well as his segment of the September 11 anthology film. Since she has been in Takeshi Kitano's Achilles and the Tortoise, Sion Sono's Love & Peace and provided voice acting work in anime films such as The Boy and the Beast, Wolf Children and the recent Mirai.
Akira Terao as Dr Azuma was a regular late Akira Kuroswa actor: he's the intransigent youngest son Taro in Ran; the main character "I" in Dreams and in Madadayo. He also starred in 1999s After the Rain, from a Kurosawa script. And so on all the way down the cast list with every actor having notable credits (e.g. Hidetoshi Nishijima who plays the usurping general's son later was the lead in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Creepy and voiced one the main characters in Hayao Miyazaki's The Wind Rises.)
Kazuaki Kiriya himself has had a bit of a quiet time since Casshern, which was his debut film, only directing two further features so far. He directed the 2009 samurai drama Goemon based on a Robin Hood-style figure. And then in 2015 he surprisingly helmed the Morgan Freeman and Clive Owen starring Last Knights, although this was first film he was not also the writer, cinematographer and editor on according to imbd. These later films may be more fantasy than sci-fi but they certainly share with Casshern an interest in a fantastical location acting as giant metaphors rather than trying to be particularly believable as functional societies in themselves, as well as heroes who exist at around the upper-middle class level of society being the figures doing the physical fighting and trying to survive in wider almost irreconcilable conflicts between the high and low.
He was also married to pop star Hikaru Utada for a period in the mid 2000s and directed a number of her music videos from around the same time as Casshern (2001-2006) including Final Distance, Travelling, Hikari, Sakura Drops, Deep River, Dareka No Negai Ga Kanau Koro (Or "When Someone's Wish Comes True", the end credits song to Casshern), You Make Me Want To Be A Man, Be My Last, Passion and Keep Tryin'.
