Sitting on the couch "Terra Formars" just happened to be playing on my TV screen. I knew nothing of the manga series, but Takashi Miike's involvement - I thought I'll give it a shot and see what he would bring to the fold. The varied career of Miike, churning out films like no other. Each tonally different to the point you don't know what to expect. Sometimes you are picking up your jaw from off the ground, while other times you're left scratching your head and then possibly awe-struck because you're seeing something rather normal. Reading the outline for this film, it seemed like Miike could have fun. So in a way I wasn't too sure what was lifted from the source material compared to what was Miike doing his signature madcap craziness.
"Terra Formars" is downright nonsensical sci-fi pulp. A run-of-the-mill beginning (the dirty dozen in a futuristic set-up on a mission to the planet Mars) succumbs to a smorgasbord of heavy CG, bug morphing accompanied by a informative lesson on the insects the character become, hammy dialogues, ridiculously crazy fight sequences and volatile bug squishing. And I mean a lot of squishing! So it can get messy watching beefed-up humanoid cockroaches, humans and hybrid human-insects with their limbs tenaciously torn off, heads being snapped back and insides seeping out, but this messiness also included the minor storytelling. Characters and their story arches have no real clarity. They're thrown together in such a careless, rushed manner that when the deaths pile up there's little emotional impact. And most of the cast are killed before reaching the hour mark! From then onwards it only gets weirder and absurd in its denouncements, while giving a little exposition to remaining characters. Really the plot plays secondary to the on-screen action; set-piece after set-piece of cartoon-like CG activity.
Watch how the exterminators become the exterminated, as these hand-picked criminals dressed to impress in their space suits are facing something much more than your standard cockroach like first thought; as now they've evolved into humanoid killing machines intent of slaughtering humans.
"Terra Formars" is downright nonsensical sci-fi pulp. A run-of-the-mill beginning (the dirty dozen in a futuristic set-up on a mission to the planet Mars) succumbs to a smorgasbord of heavy CG, bug morphing accompanied by a informative lesson on the insects the character become, hammy dialogues, ridiculously crazy fight sequences and volatile bug squishing. And I mean a lot of squishing! So it can get messy watching beefed-up humanoid cockroaches, humans and hybrid human-insects with their limbs tenaciously torn off, heads being snapped back and insides seeping out, but this messiness also included the minor storytelling. Characters and their story arches have no real clarity. They're thrown together in such a careless, rushed manner that when the deaths pile up there's little emotional impact. And most of the cast are killed before reaching the hour mark! From then onwards it only gets weirder and absurd in its denouncements, while giving a little exposition to remaining characters. Really the plot plays secondary to the on-screen action; set-piece after set-piece of cartoon-like CG activity.
Watch how the exterminators become the exterminated, as these hand-picked criminals dressed to impress in their space suits are facing something much more than your standard cockroach like first thought; as now they've evolved into humanoid killing machines intent of slaughtering humans.