I had heard this was a classic of Japanese cyberpunk, and knew nothing about it beyond that, or even what Japanese cyberpunk meant exactly. I’d seen Ghost in the Shell, so I thought high-tech low-life was in order, but I was not prepared for the industrial insanity that is this movie.
That being said, this film was GLORIOUS, and at just over an hour long, I realized that, with every surreal and weird turn it took, this was a film that said a big “fuck you” to cinematic convention and did whatever the hell it damn well pleased. With metal and pain.
The subject matter is immediately enthralling: these people are being consumed by metal, or infected by it, and they are slowly becoming more metal than flesh without ever being entirely either. At first the idea of technology making us more machine-than-man surfaced, but as the metal became more extreme, more grotesque, and more-out-of-control it became apparent the theme goes beyond a simple question of what it means to be human. If tech is at the center of this film’s theme, this film suggests that, perhaps, technology is human in nature and not the other way around.
Whether technology is at the core of this movie is debatable, because the central narrative is the painful transformation into something strange, unnatural, and brutal. The scenes are dense and would benefit from a more detailed analysis than what I’m writing here.
This film is stark, raw, industrial, and lush, though lush does not do service to how much time and effort must have gone into every part of the props, makeup, and just plain weird shit. The only word that really does it justice is phantasmagoria. This is not the kind of softcore-porn-noir-corporate-cyberpunk-genre stuff “cyberpunk” has come to mean.
This is your grandfather’s howling, incoherent, industrial nightmare fuel.
Lotus Reviews 