Casshern is one of a very small category of movies I call “experimental epics,” where a groundbreaking look-and-feel is combined with an engaging story to produce something totally new: part science fiction, part retro-futurism, part mystic fantasy and part family epic. It could have been a mere exercise in effects technology, but it has a fearless passion to it, a heedless excess that makes it transcend its pulp-fantasy roots and its occasional heavy-handedness. The real source of the film’s inspiration is the mid-Seventies anime Robot Hunter Casshan, but the film bares only the vaguest possible resemblance to the original story. A slavishly faithful remake would scarcely have been worth bothering with. Instead, the movie takes some of the core conceits, surrounds them with an all-new setting and and allows them to take on an unexpected gravity.
Casshern is set in what could be called a “retro-fascist” world, one where Asia and Russia have been fighting the rest of the world in a war that has dragged on for decades. Massive steel effigies of various dictators loom over giant factories that belch out filth and fire, and all the signage is in both Cyrillic and kanji. Airships ferry soldiers to and from the battlefields, where a few stalwart holdouts (branded as “terrorists,” of course) continue to make trouble. The look and feel of the movie are absolutely dazzling, even if (and sometimes because) they seem not quite real, but fanciful and exaggerated. Blade Runner showed us what the future might actually look like, but Casshern is entirely imagined (which is no flaw, simply a difference of intention).
