Attack on Titan: Part 1

WARNING: This review is hidden because it reveals the content of the film.
Click here to show this review. I’ve never seen the “Attack on Titan” television series, nor have I read any of the Manga. I knew the plot had nothing to do with a space battle on Saturn’s moons (that’s an astronomy joke for ya!) but otherwise I went in as a blank slate. In my opinion “Attack on Titan – Part 1” is a mixed bag. At times truly brilliant, disturbing and satisfying in its action in equal quantities the tone is woefully uneven, with over-the-top performances.

One hundred years ago, huge, immortal and insatiable humanoid-like creatures named Titans appeared on Earth, devouring everyone in their path. The survivors now live in a large castle-like city with walls tall enough to stave off any attack. When a new, Colossal Titan appears and breaches the outer wall, our heroes Eren (Haruma Miura) and Armin (Kanata Hongo) lose everything, including their best friend Mikasa (Kiko Mizuhara) Now they are enlisted in the city’s special ops team: Titan slayers whose mission is to seal the breach in the outer wall. If they can pull off this mission the city has a chance at survival.

Regardless of your familiarity with the source material, this is an amazing setup. It’s almost like a zombie movie… but the ghouls are the size of Godzilla. The Titans are truly chilling creatures. They look mostly like people except that their faces are not quite right, almost like crude drawings of what humans should be. They shuffle around with blank stares grinning from ear to ear, only displaying any form of intelligence when they spot people, which they promptly snatch up and stuff in their mouths while giggling gleefully. I’ve seen a lot of messed-up stuff on-screen, but the sight of these giant naked creatures tearing men to shreds or licking their lips excitedly as farmers run panicking truly disturbed me.

It’s a post-apocalyptic world. Resources are getting thin to the point where they don’t have guns anymore and equipment is starting to look awfully reminiscent of what we had in the middle ages. Our last hope are these young adults who are equipped with twin grappling hook cannons on their hips. They use these to zip around crumbling skyscrapers at high speed and hack away at the Titans’ only weak spots.

There are many scenes where the action and the horror are very well blended together. This film is not afraid of killing off characters, and you won’t see the deaths coming. I found myself getting really excited as a team gathered their courage and decided to confront a couple of Titans head-on… only for one of them to get swatted out of the sky and turn into red mist (a negative for me, there’s a LOT of CG blood here) You feel like a ping pong ball getting wacked back and forth between a paddle of horror and another of exhilarating kick-butt action.

Unfortunately, I get the sense that everything enjoyable about this first film (there’s a part 2) comes from the show. The additions and substitutions required to turn “Attack on Titan” into a live-action film have not been particularly kind to this material. I strongly disliked the comic relief injected here, in the form of an over enthusiastic scientist (Satomi Ishihara as Hange) She belongs in a completely different movie. Hiroki Hasegawa as a Titan slayer so cool nothing seems to fluster him named Shikishima. He’s pulled right out of the most generic anime, someone added to appease the fangirls rather than a real person. He’s literally more interested in posing and whipping his swords around in stylish formations than actually killing Titans… even when people around him are being eaten alive. As for the performances, you’ve got to be really hammy or incredibly wooden for someone who doesn’t even speak Japanese (a. k. a. Me) to recognize that your performers are not particularly good.

Perhaps this is once again because I’m not familiar with the show and books, but I had trouble identifying who was who for at least a third of the film. It’s not that I think all Japanese men and women look the same, it’s just that with so many people being quickly introduced and then killed off I found it difficult to mentally sort out who to keep track of. It also certainly doesn’t help that everyone (with a few exceptions) wears the same clothing, uses the same weapons, and has the same hairstyle/colour as everybody else. For that reason I want to give special mention to… oh. Apparently it’s some character that’s been made up for the movie so finding out who portrayed that guy with the axe is nearly impossible. Great. Most glaring as clearly NOT being from the original source material is the soundtrack, which could not be more appropriate if they had little children singing instead. It’s obviously been forced in to sell a soundtrack, but was the rock music while people are being devoured really necessary?

I don’t know how they’re going to wrap up this huge plot in just one more movie. I’m not sure what to make of a final, big revelation as this first part closed out but I’m very intrigued. There are a lot of missteps here and they have nothing to do with the fact that even a big budget Japanese film costs less than some no-special effects comedies released by Hollywood. We’re talking about mistakes that should never come up in any movie like bad comedy, awkward performances and an inappropriate soundtrack, along with characters that don’t act like human beings and have some of the worst peripheral vision you can find in any giant monster movie.

Despite everything there’s enough here that works. If you’re intrigued about the phenomenon that is “Attack on Titan” but you can’t quite commit to blindly buying the series on Blu-ray (or you know, doing some reading) it’s worth checking out. (Theatrical version on the big screen with English subtitles, October 26, 2015)