Serdar | Genji Press

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).

The third of the Alien films was a murdered movie—abandoned by its director, David Fincher, cut to shreds by its studio and savaged by both critics and audiences—but it was, sadly, never that good to begin with. For years people had speculated about a director’s cut, but Fincher went on record to say that he would never bother; the less he had to do with Alien³, the better. When Fox reissued the other Alien movies in a fantastic series of 2-disc reissues, they decided to produce a special edition for Alien³ as well. Without Fincher, however, they had to rely on using the film’s original answer print, a two-plus-hour version with many additional and extended scenes that represented the state of the film before the tampering began.

I saw the original Alien³ many moons ago, and I was in agreement with its detractors: it was a magnificent-looking movie that completely failed to enlist my interest. The extended version supplies us with far more interesting characters than the first one, gives them more to deal with, and looks terrific, too—but the biggest problems with Alien³ were and still are its weak story. If the first movie was a haunted house in space and the second movie was a war movie in space, the third movie is—what? A monastery in space? A prison in space? Not that the exact label would matter much, but it’s one way of showing how patched-together and haphazard it all is.