Total let down, as far as I'm concerned
I had great expectations for this movie, but alas, it was a real let down, as far as I'm concerned.The only really good part was the subplot involving Haru, the beautifully tragic (or tragically beautiful) character portrayed by Morikawa Aoi. If they had made a short movie using only those scenes, I would've given it a 10!
Unfortunately, everything else was either "meh" or else just plain bad, imho.
For once, instead of my usual "honorable mentions", I'll go for some well-deserved "dishonorable mentions":
1) while Miura Haruma managed to give a decent performance (nothing spectacular imho, sorry...but at least it was okay), the rest of the male cast was - again, imho, take no offence - plainly terrible! O___o
2) the sound guy(s) should be fired: the audio was annoyingly deafening whenever SFX, music or shouts were involved, and then almost totally inaudible whenever the normal dialogues were taking place. And adding insult to injury, the parts "in English" only got Japanese, but not English subs (which of course would not be a problem normally, but here - hence my quotation marks! - the "parts in English" were actually either in "Japanglish" or in a thick Scottish accent - imagine listening to a speech by Sir Alex Ferguson with only Japanese subtitles to help you decipher what the hell he's mumbling! >__<)
3) last but certainly not least (and as I previously mentioned, apart from Haru's subplot), the script was as bland, plain and uninteresting as they come: a bunch of random scenes and sequences thrown together don't make for good storytelling - at least, not in my book.
As I said, a real let down.../.__.\
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Disappointed
I was enjoying this for the first little while, but it verges too far and too often into anti-Westernism/Japanese nationalism for my taste. So much so that it almost seems like something that could have been produced in China (it actually very loosely reminds me of "Once Upon a Time in China").I went into it with the expectation that there would be some interesting commentary of (or at least portrayal of) Japan's relationship with the Western world (considering that that is the historical context of the film), but it is actually very one-dimensional: "Westerners are our enemies who just want to colonize us." A bit tasteless in that regard.
Very clearly a Japanese movie made for Japanese people.
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