Midnight Matinee at the All-You-Can-Eat Science Fiction Buffet

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 31
Takashi Yamazaki (writer/director), Returner

The mysterious extraterrestrial Daggra have overtaken humanity’s last fortress. With her species on the verge of extinction, Milly, a hardened, cynical warrior, steps into the time portal which carries her from 2084, clear back to 2002. Her mission: stop humanity’s First Contact with the Daggra, which will happen overlooking Tokyo Bay. But she’s missing important information, like how exactly to find this contact point, or what’s destined to happen.

This movie’s cover art, featuring Takeshi Kaneshiro posing with a pistol, mirror shades, and flapping black coat, suggests it’s a blatant ripoff of The Matrix, which was only three years old when this movie came out. If you think that, though, you’ve set your sights way too low. Writer-director Takeshi Yamazaki pillages story elements from dozens of American and international science fiction films, creating a beautiful, tantalizing smorgasbord of excess.

Arriving in Tokyo, Milly (Anne Suzuki, Snow Falling on Cedars) immediately prepares for violence; instead, she finds a city overrun with neon and commerce, where her wartime skills have little market. Except, of course, for one buyer: the Yakuza. Milly quickly falls in with paid assassin Miyamoto (Takeshi Kaneshiro), who thinks he’s killed her. He’s mistaken, since she arrived wearing armor. Naturally she tapes a bomb to his neck and demands his compliance.

Within the movie’s opening act, Yamazaki openly signals several of the movies he’s ransacking for ideas: the Terminator and Matrix franchises, Japanese kaiju movies like Godzilla, Hong Kong martial arts cop movies, American cyberpunk novels (the Yakuza subplot is redolent with bits recycled from William Gibson’s career-making works), and more. Yamazaki has stolen everything that wasn’t nailed down. It’s messy, and it ought to stink.

But it doesn’t. Yamazaki propels his story with the same playful glee and wretched excess of American directors like Sam Peckinpah and Quentin Tarantino, likewise famous for making massive, cornball collages of their favorite influences. This massive array of familiar science fiction and martial arts tropes, unmoored from their sources and slammed together with joyous fervor, coalesces into something distinct. Like Star Wars or LotR, it outgrows its sources.

Takeshi Kaneshiro (right) and Anne Suzuki on the brink of first contact, in Returner

Miyamoto doesn’t want Milly’s quest; he thinks her story of flying saucers and killer reptiles sounds ridiculous. But he knows her bomb works, so apparently he must comply, and he does. It certainly doesn’t hurt that Milly’s quest overlaps his, since the Yakuza boss he’s tracking has stolen the crashed Daggra spaceship. Cruel, venal Mizoguchi wants to strip the spaceship, and its injured pilot, for black market parts.


Milly and Miyamoto race against time, desperate to prevent the war Milly barely survived, but aware that Mizoguchi could make things infinitely worse. Milly has a secret weapon: she can move faster than the eye can see (“there is no spoon”), but only for short bursts. Soon they discover Miyamoto has his own secret, a telepathic link to the injured Daggra. Milly soon realizes everything she ever believed about her enemy was a lie.

Because of course it was.

Yamazaki brings together an international cast for a multilingual extravaganza. His characters move between Tokyo’s glamorous, colorfully lit upper crust and its suppurating underbelly, a transition made possible by Miyamoto’s lucrative skills in violence. And our heroes find themselves poised on the knife’s edge between pure science and its yucky commercial face. Every aspect of this story turns on themes of balance between mirror selves.

Taken together, this story wouldn’t work in a drier, more self-consciously cinematic picture. This movie is loud, saturated in color when it isn’t completely obscured in soot, and paced like a fireworks display. Yamazaki not only doesn’t disguise his takings from international cinema, he billboards them, announcing his bricolage as something proud and brash. It’s like a master-course in just enough of better films to create something new.

Naturally the film comes courtesy of the production house Toho, famous internationally as home of Godzilla and Akira Kurosawa. Besides its American influences, naked, scaly Daggra connect the story to its kaiju genes, while Miyamoto is clearly a modern, somewhat Americanized samurai. It’s consistent with much prior low-budget Japanese schlock fare, but Yamazaki makes it look anything but low-budget. Because he also steals crisp American cinematic gloss.

Critics hated this picture, naturally. It’s about as subtle as Alien vs. Predator on amphetamines. Yet its complete lack of restraint makes it something else, a big, sloppy applesauce of late-20th-Century cinematic aplomb. It doesn’t apologize for itself, nor should it, because it does what good movies should: it carries audiences along until the final, well-earned moments.