Casshern - futuristic Asian film

Saw it and liked it enough to actually buy the DVD. I think it was all green screen. And yeah, it's a little short on straight-ahead story, but it sure is pretty.

Saw it on the big screen, which was quite mindbending, if a little exhausting.

I think the problems I had following the plot may have been to do with it being a condensed remake of a long-running anime saga from 70's Japanese TV. I think the makers could reasonably assume that most of the target audience grew up with it and knew it inside out. I imagine the experience I had was like seeing the recent crop of Marvel comics based films if you had no familiarity with the characters whatsoever. Expositions quickly skimmed over, lots of added grown up emoting.

Definitely one to see if you've a taste for far East weirdness and excess. Now I'm just waiting for the xxxHolic anime.

Most boring film EVER!!!! It stank.

Yeah, I hated this one too. I'd put it in with Narnia, Harry Potter, Lord Of The Rings etc as a film that seems to have just been made for fans of the original book / manga or whatever. Coming to it as an outsider, it seemed to be a series of episodic set-pieces that were merely ticking off the bits that the fans wanted to see. Shame really, cos the idea of making a film entirely by use of green-screen acting plus post-production trickery is kind of interesting.

My (Japanese) wife's verdict - "otaku stuff".

some bits just spun me out completely. one minute you see an entire building explode and then the flames morph into a cartoon of a big-headed man running up a plasticine hill and then it documents the slow climb of some hobbits who turn out to be invincible fighters crawling through some snow.

Has anybody seen Immortel? Supposedly similar, same full-on green-screen scifi output sort of thing. But French.

How does Casshern compare to Sky Captain?

the problem with Immortel is that most of the supporting cast consists of really really crappy-looking cgi puppets (whose crappiness is explained away as "synthskin" or something)

Sky Captain is much much much better (and that considering the abject miscasting of the two leads) a top fun film in comparison. Casshern is just boring, something which Sky Captain, for all of its faults, rarely is.

The design aspects of Sky Captain seem more coherent as well. For a film which has superhero zombies beating up an army of robots, Casshern is remarkably dull.

Did I mention how boring Casshern was. It is.

on the other hand, theres a flying hammerhead shark with tentacles busting out of a toilet. i bet Casshern and Sky Captain are too tasteful for something like that! xpost

i didn't find casshern boring at all - maybe a bit overlong but there's too much going on to find it boring.

What other properties/styles of pictorial narrative should be turned into 100% green-screen super stylefest action adventure films?

obv as an otaku I vote for Genesis Climber Mospeada, because motorbikes should all turn into robot body armor at the flick of a switch, to be used fighting colonialist mollusk aliens.

No, I was never bored during Casshern - just a bit baffled and (enjoyably) overloaded.

The guy at AICN is talking up an adaptation of Edgar Rice Burrough's Mars books. If it ever comes off, it'll have to be an all CGI extavaganza on a Casshern scale - major characters are four armed green monsters, there are epic battles between flying ships etc. etc.

Pete otm. I mean, it had its moments--the white headgear/suit thing automatically turning into armor, and a few other things I can't now remember--but by the end I felt like I was going to start bleeding from the eyes too.