Sunday, August 22, 2010

A Short Review Of Tetsuo The Iron Man

By Karyn Rojas

Tetsuo Iron Man was the debut film from Japanese madman director Shinya Tsukamoto. Even if you don't like reading subtitles, put it on your queue next time you log into your movie download service anyways. It's NOT that kind of foreign film. It's practically a silent film, because it's really just all action, special effects and weirdness, with very little dialog.

The movie follows a typical Japanese salary man who, for no reason at all, starts to sprout pieces of scrap metal from his body. It starts when he's shaving and pieces of... Aluminum cans or something start growing from his face. It's very strange. Eventually, he grows into a living, breathing heap of junk metal, and it winds up being a great example of Cronenberg's body horror genre.

The concept behind the movie was to make something like a monster film with a human sized badguy. The end result is sort of the Japanese answer to both David Cronenberg, and David Lynch's Eraserhead. It's definitely a strange journey full of unforgettable images, for better or for worse. The movie might be right up your alley, or it may leaving you simply scratching your head, but it's not an experience you'll forget any time soon.

This is really what Japanese cyberpunk is all about. It's not so much about the relation between man and computers as man and industrial concepts. So the film is filled with imagery of steam and steel and junkyards and factories. The closest comparison in American cyberpunk would be Robocop, set in the industrial city of Detroit. Although Robocop has nothing on this film's style.

The style of the movie is what really makes it special. It's fast, it's confusing, it looks like a nightmare with a stark black and white look. It really does feel more like a bad dream than it does like anything that could ever happen in real life.

The movie primarily draws influence from Eraserhead and Cronenberg's Videodrome. A warning, if those movies made you squeamish, this one will, too.

Tsukamoto has since created some of the greatest films to come out of Japan in the last few decades. In particular, Tokyo Fist is a real classic, and one of the greatest films ever made on the subject of the male ego and what can happen when a conflict is allowed to snowball with neither side backing down. It's really a great, deep look at what it means to be a man.

He's also gone on to have a career as an actor (he plays a major character in this film), starring as a major character in Ichi the Killer. His career is certainly one to watch. Twenty years after his debut, it's clear that he's just warming up. - 40731

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