Yamamoto: "It's all your fault, boy. Because of you, the world will soon become hell."
Ichigo: "Oh, I'm sorry. I had no idea it was my fault. I guess I shouldn't have asked the bad guys to BEAT ME UP, KIDNAP MY SISTER, AND TAKE HER TO HELL!!!"
-The heroes of our story..."Alright this movie was AQWESOME ICHIGO KICKED SO MHYCH ASSWHERE ARE THE ESPADA I THOUGHOUT THE ESPADA WOULLD BE IN THIS MOIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1111111111111""""
-
"Despite having the most hype of the four movies, it has gotten a mixed response from both Japanese and English-Speaking fans. Unlike the last three, which focused more on Character Development, this one was more action-oriented at the cost of a few jarring instances of Character Derailment."
-The TV Tropes entry on this movie
"Who are these fans and where can I find them?"
-Me, upon reading the TV Tropes entry
"Bleach" is an animal all its own, one of several anime series poised to take Dragon Ball's place as the longest-running shonen series ever. It's a franchise which has spawned over 450 chapters of material (so far), a 300+ episode anime, a wealth of fans, seven musicals, and four movies, the last of which I plan on reviewing here.
It's also become one of the most controversial subjects as far as fans are concerned. Drawn and written by "acclaimed" manga artist Tite Kubo, Bleach was first published in 2001, and after a few years it became a breakout hit in Japan, and later here in America. Since then, it's starting sucking. Hard. To sum it up in so many words, Bleach is the heartwarming tale of a teenage delinquent named Ichigo who gains the power of a Shinigami, otherwise known as a "death god." After a short (twenty episodes is considered "short" in Japan) introductory arc, Ichigo teams up with a five-to-seven man band of likewise superpowered individuals to participate in an escalating series of battles for his friends and the fate of...I dunno. The world? The afterlife? A career in modeling? Who knows?
Along with Dragon Ball Z, which has already become a household title here in the West, Bleach has been instructive in how an action-driven series can go so horribly wrong. Fights become an arms race of power levels and special attacks, but as the physical stakes increase, the story itself has suffered. Bleach has spent nearly half of its published life in the middle of a "war" story against the same antagonists. Any individual battle between two combatants can take up to several weeks to finish (Bleach is a weekly series), and any one issue of Bleach will consist of reaction shots for ten pages, followed by one or two actual attacks; the sum of all these has been nearly five years of almost no plot development. The anime itself has suffered, trying to pad out a twenty-minute episode based on twenty pages of reaction shots and characters staring at each other.
Since then, Kubo has spent the past year trying to bring the manga back to basics. Ichigo has been (mostly) depowered, forced to face a group of relatively street-level antagonists in an effort to regain his powers. The action takes place in the realm of us mere mortals once more, giving the impression that it's down-to-earth (although enlisting the aid of the other Shinigami may have ultimately rendered this moot).
The sum of these two elements is what makes up the fourth and latest movie, "Jingoku-Hen," or "Hell Chapter"--which tries so halfheartedly to reconcile the basics of the manga with the nonstop battles the series has ultimately become. It doesn't help that, of all of the movies, it was endlessly hyped and billed as a fiery (pun intended), thrilling action movie, but for all of this it could have actually been a good movie. Those two things don't have to be mutually exclusive (see "The Dark Knight," "Iron Man," "Goldeneye," etc.).
This blending of Bleach classic and Bleach/Dragonball Z could have been done well, and the juxtaposition of the two could have been much smoother. The first minute and a half is a sort of action prologue, which shows Ulquiorra and a Hollowed-out Ichigo beating the crap out of each other. It's smooth, it's brisk, it's well-animated, and it's exciting, something that few of the so-called battles in the series can boast anymore. It also sets the tone for the movie: it's going to be dark, it's going to be pitch-black, and you will see Hollow Ichigo before this movie is over...
Then, after the opening, we get Bleach Classic. It looks like it's lifted wholesale from the first episode. In fact, a buddy of mine (the same buddy who gave me those Bleach DVD's to begin with) thought it was the first episode ("Aw, not these guys again..."). This isn't a callback, it's blatant self-plagiarism. That shouldn't even be possible.
The fight scenes are actually pretty good. I wouldn't call them great, but they allow for a smooth back-and-forth between opponents, and they don't suffer from Kubo's usual trademarks, which usually involve one guy winning ridiculously easily while talking to the other guy about how ridiculously easily he's won (usually by having a stronger aura than the other guy). Plus, since it's a movie, the fight scenes eventually have to...y'know, end? It probably helps that the bad guys in this movie are from hell, and are therefore just "different," rather than just being outright stronger or weaker than the other characters.
It's when the action slows down that you start noticing things. Like the fact that these guys from hell can just pop into our world whenever they want, even though they're supposedly looking for "freedom" from hell. Or the one scene where Ichigo and Kokuto are traveling down some stairs, and Ichigo falls...somehow, and he tries to get back up, and Kokuto helps him up, and he's all like, "Let's go now, and forget this pointless twenty seconds of film ever happened."
Or the fact that a lot of the scenes in this movie are borrowed wholesale from the main series itself: you have the first scene in the
Nowhere is this more evident than the obligatory "boring talkie-talkie" scene between the hero and his "supervisor." In the Yamamoto-Ichigo cop routine quoted above, Yamamoto calls out our hero for being a cowboy cop. This scene is done to death in just about any movie where the hero is a loose cannon cop/FBI agent/U.S. soldier/bakery chef; the idea is that the authority figure is trying to minimize the damage our hero has caused, such as...I dunno, using his signature attack to BLOW OPEN THE HELLGATE AND UNLEASH HELL ITSELF ON THE WORLD!!!
Yamamoto makes a persuasive argument, considering this is the fabric of two worlds we're talking about. But what he also forgets is that he, and his squadrons of Shinigami in general, can be overly bureaucratic when it comes to enforcing the rules of the Soul Society, and at one point, they tried to kill Ichigo and his friends upon enforcing said rules. So Ichigo says "That was my sister they kidnapped! You wanted me to just leave her there?! She's my family! You think a Shinigami can just look the other way when one of his own is in trouble?! Well, I quit! You can take this badge and shove it...."
Oh, wait, I forgot, Ichigo doesn't say anything. Because power levels are all that matter in this series, and because Yamamoto has the highest power level in the series (with the possible exception of the main villain), and because Ichigo is all yelled-out from the last scene, and because he's a complete tool. Why doesn't Ichigo say what we're thinking? For that matter, if Yamamoto or any of Ichigo's mentors are so tough, why don't they go in there and take care of business?
For those of you who don't follow Bleach, what you need to understand is that Ichigo is one of those angsty, "down-to-earth" heroes who still has enough of that "idiot hero" in him to keep him from thinking things through. He didn't used to be this bad before his inner Hollow (the...thing at the beginning of the movie) got out of control. It might be an intentional piece of characterization in the movie; for my fellow Bleach fans out there, consider the "Deicide" arc in the main series, which takes place just after the events in the prologue and where we see him at his lowest point, and where he needs one final bout of training to break him out of his funk (and get his power level over 9000 at last).
A down-to-earth hero isn't a bad thing by any stretch of the imagination. In the beginning, I think Kubo set out to write Ichigo as a character we could relate to. But the thing about the shonen genre which Bleach is set in is that it's popularized the idea of an "idiot hero" who doesn't know what he's getting into, but faces it nonetheless. At its best, any shonen manga or cartoon will give us a sort of "everyman," an audience surrogate who overcomes all obstacles in his path and climbs his way to the top through sheer, dogged determination; the ideal idiot hero will do this because he doesn't know any better.
Kubo tried to give us this. Unfortunately, he also tried to deconstruct the ideas within the shonen genre, while still cussedly sticking to shonen conventions such as escalating power levels and unbeatable foes. Halfway through the series, Ichigo's possible love interest Orihime is kidnapped; the bad guys basically did this to get his "attention" and lure him to his death. Since he's an idiot, he falls for this hook, line, and sinker, rather than actually listening to the otherworldly beings around him, which is admirable, but in this series turns out to be futile. From that point on, the latter half of the series is devoted to showing us just how much of an idiot Ichigo is, how weak he is against the real bad guys, and how much he just sucks in general. (Plus, as many fans will tell you, he's doing all of this for some chick.)
At Ichigo's best, we think he's pretty badass, and in this movie I've somehow stopped discussing, he is. At his worst, though, we wonder why he's the main character at all. (It seems as though Spider-Man has the same problem.) Just ask a fan who their favorite character in the series is. Then ask them who their second favorite is. Then just keep going like this until you reach around the fifties or sixties or thereabouts.
These problems with the main character aren't quite as prevalent in the movie, but for anyone familiar with the series, there's still a bitter aftertaste. It doesn't help that the plot of this movie is a rehash of the infamous Hueco Mundo plot, which I've basically just discussed. For the purposes of the film, though, it helps that the bad guys explicitly tell Ichigo that they need him alive, and they need the power of his Hollow (in the series, this sort of justification for Ichigo's continued existence was an afterthought, even if Orihime was around to heal him).
In my humble opinion, his power-up at the end of the movie (unless you've seen the trailer, I guess I've spoiled you) actually made more sense than his final power-up in the series. In the series, he just goes through three or so months of unforeshadowed training, and suddenly he can do it. In the movie, they go through the trouble of showing you that hell somehow affects his unique biology, causing his Hollow powers to flare up (and if he can absorb spirit particles, why not?). Both cases are anti-climactic, but in the movie's case, it at least makes sense.
The movie's villains are basically filler villains we'll never see again, which means they range from being cardboard cutouts and/or camp gay (re: a purple-haired bishonen and a fat guy who attacks you with giant kisses) to fleshed-out, three-dimensional characters (albeit characters who still have to be put down like Old Yeller, eventually). For all the faults with the movie, they nailed Kokuto. He's got a cool design, he has great fight scenes, he's well-acted, he's badass, and he's an anti villain without being too sympathetic (anyone who's seen the trailers knows they spoiled the freaking ending). There's a reason you don't recruit someone from hell to be on your team.
This brings us to hell itself. Considering Bleach is a series about gods of freaking death, and considering the amount of time they've spent fighting bad guys (for given values of "bad"), hell has never really come up (Hueco Mundo kinda counts, but you can still come and go at will as long as you're not worried about Shinigami exorcising your soul). Considering Bleach is a series about gods of freaking death, they've always played death fairly straight; it's based on a reincarnation cycle, where all souls go back and forth between our world and Soul Society, with two abberations: the Hollows (souls who stick around here for a bit too long) and those who wind up in hell, which is what happens when you've done something so bad that the reincarnation cycle won't even touch you.
The "sinners" inside hell can apparently make brief jaunts to the world of the living, but they have to wear masks or something over their faces, or else the "Hell's Will" drags them back inside. Their face either has to be covered completely, or...not. Either they have to do that, or they don't. The group at the beginning needs their masks, but Kokuto only has his face partially covered. Why? (idk lol)
It's a world of badly-rendered CGI blocks and kaiju are apparently the enforcers of hell (the Hell's Will), but it's still pretty damn scary. The sick part is that you can die in hell, but you just come back right afterward, so "death" isn't really death in hell. And this can happen so many times until you eventually just break, and stop bothering to fight (Himura Kenshin's good friend Shishio would be disgusted with these schmucks). Why all these poor people can't travel to our world like the villains can is beyond me, although that's probably why Kubo withdrew his name from this movie (evidently even he has standards).
The CGI blocks are on the first level of hell, with a vast ocean and sky in the second level below that, a dark realm with oceans of acid on the third level, and finally Dante's Inferno and/or the Mustafar system from "Revenge of the Sith" on the fourth level, which is where the bad guys are. The actual sinners mostly stay on the first level of hell (again, with the exception of the bad guys, who are just that cool) and they won't attack you, but Hell's Will...shall attack you, and if you're just visiting hell and you die, you become a sinner and you're trapped in hell, even though you didn't actually...sin at all, hence the misleading name. So you have to go through all these levels and avoid getting killed and if you press A + X + Y + A + A you can go Bankai for five seconds but if you press that combo + X + O + Z and then bang on your console five times you can stay in Bankai indefinitely and you fight this guy with swords of fire who shoots fire at you but you can Triple Jump and do your Finishing Combo from the third game which you should have loaded using the Jump Pak and finish off fire guy but watch out 'cuz there's a surprise bonus boss and he'll shank you if you're not careful!
So...TL;DR?
Obviously I'm a fan of Bleach, more or less. It has potential, and some pretty good ideas. It also has some terrible flaws, namely in its main character, and in its execution of its potential ideas, along with its general idea of what an action series should be. The Hell Chapter is meant to satisfy fans more than anything, but even in the case of many fans, it begs the questions: Why is any of this happening? Why are these characters doing these things? Why on earth does Ichigo look like a KISS reject? It's like a lozenge to quell the bitter aftertaste of Bleach in general, but after two hours, you'll still feel it all over again.
It sounds like a cool video game, though.
Note: The Brewsky kinda quit for...most of the fall. Also, this page has no backgrounds. See you in twenty.
No comments:
Post a Comment