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Another popular manga and anime series gets the live-action makeover in a promising treatment by director Shinsuke Sato (The Princess Blade, Sand Chronicles) co-starring the ever popular Kenichi Matsuyama (Norwegian Wood, Kamui: The Lone Ninja) – and yes, the sequel is already on the way!…

When an oncoming underground train hits Kei Kurono (Kazunari Ninomiya, Letters from Iwo Jima, Tekkonkinkreet, Yellow Tears) and primary school friend Masaru Kato (Kenichi Matsuyama, Death Note, Norwegian Wood, Bare Essence Of Life) while trying to rescue a drunk, they find themselves in a simple room dominated by a ominous black sphere known only as ‘Gantz’ and surrounded by others apparently brought here just before their own death.

The sphere relays messages to them, sending them on missions to kill aliens hidden amongst us in suburban Japan like some twisted Men In Black. They may be armed super strength suits and futuristic guns that make their targets explode – but with absolutely no idea of what’s going on they soon find themselves easy targets.

For those that survive there’s little more than a brief respite back to their normal lives, before they are transporting into another mission. Soon only Kei, Kato and Kei Kishimoto (Natsuna) the only ones that survive what appears to be a real life video game, where dead contestants can be revived with 100 points…

Director Shinsuke Sato must seem a safe pair of hands when it comes to manga adaptions. Despite the fact his first film credit was for the screenplay for the late writer/director Jun Ichikawa’s Tokyo Story, his debut as director reimagined the Lady Snowblood manga from Lone Wolf And Cub creator Kazuo Koike.

Though he’s avoided getting cast in the role of manga/anime adaptor for some time, more recent work includes a live-action version of Sand Chronicles (aka Sand Clock) and the CG animated feature Oblivion Island: Haruka and the Magic Mirror. Add to that writer Yûsuke Watanabe’s track record co-writing parts of the first two 20th Century Boys films, and you’ve got a team who should be able pull something like this off…

Shouldn’t they?

Kazunari Ninomiya pitches Kei Kurono about right, with a character that first annoys due to his juvenility, being obsessed with the sight of fellow ‘contestant’ Tae naked to concentrate on the task ahead, and then by being too cocky to care about the lives he’s endangering, before finally maturing to take his place in the team seriously. This sort of ‘everyman’ character is rarther common in manga, appealing to the teenage audience, but Kazunari pulls it off where others fail, convincing you that he has started to grow up, rather than still coming off as quite irritating at the end.

Kenichi Matsuyama, rather predictably, steals every scene he’s in. This versatile actor seems prepared to keep everyone on their toes by flipping between big-budget, crowd-pleasing manga adaptations like Death Note: L – Save The WorLd and Kamui: The Lone Ninja and more ‘arty’ films like Norwegian Wood, Bare Essence Of Life and My Back Page. Again his character Kato is very much a staple of manga, he’s very much the person Kurono aspires to be.

Indeed, there’s much here that we’ve seen before: the disparate group who are taken off and have to face challenges in order to escape their fate, much like Kaiji: The Ultimate Gambler; the childhood firends who’ve lost touch, as per 20th Century Boys. As a source material Gantz appears on face value to be hardly the most revolutionary manga.

Shot back-to-back with the sequel, much as 2oth Century Boys was, the film roughly follows the plot of the first seven volumes of the published version of the manga. Director Shinsuke Sato avoids the increasingly repetitive nature of the missions by, well, not actually sending his characters on very many. He shows us formative moments of Kurono coming to grips with the abilities of the suits they’be been given, in a sequence that felt a little too close to a similar moment in the first of Sam Raimi’s Spider-man films.

He tries hard to make his alien ‘foes’ as different as he can, from the darkly lit, green haired, taloned alien with a like of onions, to the robot with a ghetto blaster. The film starts particularly gently, it almost seems like fun, until the full horror of the real peril the ‘contestants’ are in coming very suddenly into focus at the end of their first mission.

A particular highlight comes in the form of animated statues that definitely recall famous stop-motion sequences Ray Harryhausen in Jason And The Argonauts and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad with a monster-sized Buddha. Effects wise the production is pretty solid, with the action well-paced and edited.

Perhaps with too much of an eye on the sequel, some initial work filling out the characters of Kato and Tae seems halted, even before that becomes necessary (am I giving too much away?). On the other hand nothing is given away about the mysterious Gantz, which seems to hold a living man inside on a life-support system, nor why he has it in for aliens that seem to be going about their everyday lives without causing anyone harm. But unlike many other recent live-action mangas, you won’t feel like your missing out if you don’t hang around for part two, it easily doesn’t feel all of it’s two hour ten minutes in length.

I guess the real question is can he keep it going for the sequel, Gantz: Perfect Answer? The first Death Note film seemed promising enough, but the sequel took the slow train to dullsville (and one not so dull spin-off, thanks to Kenichi Matsuyama as L). 20th Century Boys paid tribute to the mammoth scale of the original manga with three films all well over two hours each – but was too much to expect audiences to stick with it? That might have worked for Peter Jackson on Lord Of The Rings, but arguably these films had very different stories to tell, and didn’t rely totally on you having seen them all to fully understand what was going on.

Indications so far ar, without giving too much away, that director Shinsuke has brought a very definite end to the story of Gantz that’s angered fans as the manga still continues to this day (but feels like the right decision to me). In Japan they only had to wait three months to find out what the sequel was like – let’s hope we don’t have too long either…

Gantz is available now on UK Blu-ray and DVD from Manga Entertainment.

Related and associated posts

• Gantz: Perfect Answer
• Adrift In Tokyo
• Norwegian Wood UK trailer
• Kamui: The Lone Ninja
• Kaiji: The Ultimate Gambler
• Review of the year: 2010
• Sawako Decides
• Akira (original manga)
• Congratulations to winners of out Kamui: The Lone Ninja competition
• Win Kamui: The Lone Ninja on DVD
• House
• Casshern
• The Sinking Of Japan
• Air Doll (LFF 2009)
• X-Cross
• Sukiyaki Western Django
• Death Note
• Tales From Earthsea

This entry was published by Andy H on Friday, October 7th, 2011 at 10:00 am and is filed under Action / Thrillers, Anime / Live-Action Manga, Films, Japan, Reviews, Sci Fi / Fantasy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.