by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After two Good Bad Movies we ended
up watching a Bad Good Movie, a 2001 Japanese animé production directed by someone credited simply as
“Rentaro” from a script by Katsuhiro Otorno based on a manga (Japanese superhero comic novel) by Osamu Tezuka. In
case you’re wondering what connection this film might have to the 1927 Fritz Lang
Metropolis, written by Lang’s
then-wife Thea von Harbou (whose reputation as a writer was considerably
rehabilitated by the restorations of the film in forms closer to Lang’s
original cut — in the chopped-down versions that circulated for years plot holes
that had been attributed to her turned out to be mistakes made by the
subsequent editors who turned into nonsense plot points that she had developed
coherently and sensibly), not much: apparently when he wrote and drew the
original manga Osamu Tezuka had
been inspired by the spectacular original poster for the 1927 Metropolis but had never seen the actual film. Katsuhiro Otorno
probably had seen the film before
he wrote this screenplay, because there are some key elements from the 1927 Metropolis that appear in this one, including the center of the
action around a giant Ziggurat Metropolis’s richest man, Duke Red (Tarô
Ishida), has ordered constructed and presented to the Metropolis city
government as a symbol of their power (in both movies the Tower of Babel story
is invoked as a metaphor for upper-class cluelessness); the character of a mad
scientist whose alienation from the rest of the world is symbolized by his
attachment to retro technology (in Lang’s Metropolis he had a watch that told the time in 12-hour
increments while the rest of the world had switched to decimal time; in this
one he still has a rotary-dial telephone); and a female character who’s both an
innocent girl and a robot determined to destroy the world.
Alas, as
simple-minded and bone-headed as the social commentary of the original Metropolis seems sometimes (even in the restored versions —
because Thea von Harbou stayed in Germany when the Nazis took power and
continued to work in the Nazi-dominated film industry, while Fritz Lang fled,
there’s a tendency to attribute all the bad aspects of their films together to
her and credit him with all the good stuff), the politics of this one are incredibly jumbled. I get the impression
that in addition to Metropolis,
Otorno had probably seen Blade Runner as well, since not only does this film feature mass-produced robots
but the only way they can be told apart from humans is by seeing if they have
emotions. This movie deals with a power struggle over Metropolis between Duke
Red, a private army he’s assembled led by his adoptive son Rock (Kôki Okada),
the established political leadership, the Metropolis military (who seem to have
the balance of power), and a band of rebels who are demanding freedom from the
horrible existence they have manufacturing robots in underground factories.
(Locating the oppressed workers underground was obviously another borrowing
from the Lang/von Harbou Metropolis.)
Eventually Duke Red kills the official mayor of Metropolis, the military takes
power on his behalf, and he looks for and ultimately finds Tima (Yuka Imoto).
For all we know Tima is one-half of a prepubescent couple and she and her
boyfriend Kenichi (Kei Kobayashi) have spent most of the movie fleeing from
Rock and his death squads, who are out to kill both of them for reasons that
aren’t really explained. Eventually, though, we learn that Tima is a
super-robot built by that retro-tech mad scientist who was himself killed
earlier — and her construction was ordered by Duke Red as his final weapon in
defeating both the civilian and military authorities and becoming dictator of
Metropolis. Only the mad scientist double-crossed Duke Red and created Tima so
she could merge with the mechanism built into the Metropolis throne (if you
were wondering what a high-tech sci-fi version of Game of Thrones would be like, wonder no more) and become a
super-powerful computer that will kill off the entire human race — and only
Kenichi, by appealing to her emotion-laced human side, can stop her from
knocking off all humanity.
The one aspect of the 2001 Metropolis that was genuinely creative was the music; rather
than either the warmed-over Korngoldisms that generally get slapped onto
science-fiction and fantasy films (the last time Charles and I watched Game
of Thrones episodes I heard the theme music
and joked, “It’s Ramin Djawadi’s ripoff of John Williams’ ripoff of Erich
Wolfgang Korngold’s ripoff of Wagner!”) or the electronic blips and burps that
are also sometimes used, director Rentaro and his music director, Toshiyuki
Honda (did he ride to work on a Kawasaki?), decided to use Dixieland jazz for
most of the soundtrack, occasionally easing into 1930’s swing. The soundtrack
features a quite idiomatic, if rather scratchy-voiced, rendition of the song
“St. James Infirmary” (the credits list Irving Mills, Duke Ellington’s original
manager and publisher, as the composer; the piece has its origins in
African-American folk music and Louis Armstrong’s beautiful 1928 recording gave
Don Redman as the composer while later issues credited “Joe Primrose,”
apparently a pseudonym for Mills) with a woman singer who at first I thought
might have been Alberta Hunter in her late-in-life comeback but turned out to
be a Japanese vocalist, Atsuki Kimura. It also scores the final near-apocalypse
to, of all things, Ray Charles’ recording of the Don Gibson country song “I
Can’t Stop Loving You,” and while the disconnect between the song and the
images is obvious and somewhat bizarre, the scene works for sheer audacity. It
also helps that the quality of the film’s animation, dull and tacky-looking in
the scenes involving people, is quite spectacular in the scenes of fireworks
going off and, ultimately, buildings blowing up. But otherwise the 2001 Metropolis is a leaden spectacle whose humanist and
anti-corporate pretensions only make it seem duller than it would if it were just a shoot-’em-up action movie with ray guns instead of
pistols or rifles. The imdb.com review — at least the one that showed up when I
accessed their page on this film — was by someone or something called
“LittleMiso” who obviously likes animé films considerably more than I do and who headlined their review, “It’s
very hard to believe how many people hate this movie.” I can’t speak for anyone
else but I can tell you why I
don’t like this movie — why through long stretches of it I wished I were doing
practically anything else — because it’s b-o-r-i-n-g and it makes virtually no sense!
