Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira (1999)

I was riding down the sunny streets of New York City on a motorcycle. As I sped toward Times Square, the former owner of my new bike’s parents shuttered through my mind: I wondered what their reaction would be when they found out that their son had just been murdered for his Tetsuo brand motorcycle. The thought passed, and I kept riding.

It wasn’t the first homicide I had committed that day. Just minutes earlier, I aimed the barrel of my gun at a propane tank parked at a fueling station and pulled the trigger. I wasn’t able to count the bodies before I could get away from the Five-O on the unidentified man’s Tetsuo bike, the same who lay dead on the pavement in the middle of the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood.

The cops were catching up to me now. Fifty, sixty, seventy the speedometer read. I was the Minnesota cowboy who could not be caught; something in my teetering bulb of dread and dream knew I would never be. And so I killed again

The police were cut off by a walk only street in Greenwich Village. My newly hijacked motorcycle, a Kaneda model, was acquired from an Eastern European gentleman below an underpass off of Highway 78 running alongside the Hudson River. The man’s neck snapped sharply between my fingerless leather gloves. It was the last noise his body would ever make as his legs twitched silently beneath my feet. Sirens blared. This time, I didn’t have enough time to think about his parents.

I raced down the east end of Broadway St, weaving in between a combination of pedestrians, limos, and pigeons. A police officer flew out his windshield into oncoming traffic behind me, sporadically bouncing across the concrete safari of the city for blocks. I knew an acquaintance would be waiting in Brooklyn with a chopper to take us out of the sights and minds of the NYPD, but it would take more than a motorcycle to get there.

I headed for the docks on the Lower East Side, where I might be able to hijack a jet ski to take across East River into the borough to the south. The plot thickened when I tried to pass the SWAT teams on South Essex Street, where spotlights blinded and helicopters deafened. I was about to finally be roped in. The tires of my Kaneda were shot out by a rooftop sniper. For a moment, I flew. The next, I lay dead.

The masochistic nature of my killing spree in Grand Theft Auto IV left me thinking about those motorcycles I rode in my final hour of play. I suspected the names were Japanese, and I knew for a fact that they were fictitious.

Fictitious, but not original. A Google search took me to a character list for an animated film called Akira. Rockstar Games, the makers of the Grand Theft Auto series, branded their virtual motorcycles under the veil of an Easter egg, the names of Akira’s central characters.

George Lucas and Steven Spielberg labeled the film unmarketable in the United States, but Akira managed to achieve cult status after its national 2001 release.

Tetsuo and Kaneda are cyberpunk motorcycle gangsters, members of a society described as “low life and high technology.” Akira has an advantage over live action films in the genre in that the special effects options that went into making a dystopian Tokyo circa 2019 were limitless in its art form.

Akira is much praised as an animated cult movie that managed to influence live-action blockbusters. The Matrix (1999) drew from Akira’s account of a human’s attempt to do right in a corrupt, technology-based society, a remarkable feat for a film without any actors. Wu-Tang Clan leader RZA looked to director Katsuhiro Otomo’s methods of audio engineering when creating the sound effects for Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003) and Vol. 2 (2004), compositing the noise produced by a 1929 Harley Davidson with that of a jet engine.

Word of a live-action remake of Akira arises in the media every so often. Warner Brothers Studios bought the rights in 2008, and the various proposed cast lists have been exclusively white A-List: Ryan Gosling and James Franco as the leads, Mila Kunis as femme fatale, Helena Bonham Carter typecast as the villain. No deals between the studio and the actors were ever secured, and production has shut down a total of four times as of January 2012. It’s better that way. The power of Otomo’s storytelling with the animated art form is timeless.

Watch for the respect Kaneda gives his brethren in light of their losses, dissimilar from the respect I failed to give my victims back in my Grand Theft Auto IV days. Hayao Miyazaki fanboys could never stomach the violence you are about to witness.

August King
Film Club Co-President

Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985)

As we die-hard Monty Python fans know, Terry Gilliam, the illustrator for the movies and the TV series, is not only the American Python but also a native Minnesotan. Like Bob Dylan and other famous sons, however, we’ve seen little of him for a very long time. Provincial sour grapes aside, Gilliam’s fantastical cartoons for Monty Python offer a telling preview into the visual and narrative extremes of the movie Brazil.

Brazil’s convoluted plot, made more so by a disastrous studio recut, sends a pathetic everyman named Sam Lowry (played by Jonathan Pryce) into the classic and absurdly comic bureaucratic hell. While one recut tacks an abrupt happy ending onto the film (and cuts out numerous scenes in the middle), Gilliam’s director’s cut extends the absurdity in Freudian directions that explore Sam’s love interest in a final dream sequence. Although numerous recuts make plot summary more difficult, the basic plot outline is so convoluted it hardly matters. These recuts of the film, including a UK television version, the studio version, and Gilliam’s ultimate director’s cut (which Film Club is showing tonight), suggest even those responsible for the film don’t quite know what’s supposed to be happening. If you want a carefully crafted plot, you might want to look elsewhere. Enjoy Brazil for the splendid visual chaos, the satire of consumer culture, and it’s newly relevant look at terrorism and torture.

Amidst our current national discussion of torture and its consequences, watching Terry Gilliam’s absurdist dystopia Brazil may feel more chilling than absurd. It envisions a totalitarian state that clearly aims for the brutal efficiencies of Orwell’s 1984. In that grey, bleak novel, the omnipotent Big Brother seeks to extinguish all hope and all love from the world through a culture of paralyzing fear and mind numbing disinformation.

In Gilliam’s version, a similarly grey ideal gets sidetracked by gross incompetence. In this world, terrorism is mostly a common sense response to repeated bureaucratic ineptitude best shown by Robert DeNiro’s maniacal heating/air conditioning repairman who rebels against the system by doing unauthorized and (gasp!) undocumented repairs on HVAC systems. Similarly, Sam Lowry’s love interest in the film, the beautiful terrorist Jill Layton (Kim Greist), ultimately seeks to destroy the central authority through bombings after trying and failing to help her neighbor with government bureaucracy. Most chillingly, however, fellow former Python Michael Palin plays the chief torturer for the regime with a disturbing ability to compartmentalize. Moving from dingy office to domed torture chamber, Palin’s character looks like a slightly deranged dentist who cheerfully follows orders to apply his own “enhanced interrogation techniques” on whoever appears at his office door.

Despite its occasional bleakness, Gilliam’s movie (in whatever version) gleefully satirized plastic surgery, mindless office work, and technology in ways both more relevant and more comic than they were before.

John Wensman
Guest Film Club Commentator
SPA English Dept.

Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1983)

It’s a simple question: What makes us human? At this point, you could have about fifty different answers: our physical structure; our ability to rationalize, to think, to have memories, to feel emotions, to dream, to hope. To love. But in the end, your ability to believe you are human could simply be a conscious dream. There is nothing you can truly do to prove to yourself that you are more than possibly a machine. Blade Runner asks us this question: How can we know we are truly human?

Directed by Ridley Scott (Alien, Gladiator) and adapted from the famous novel by Phillip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Blade Runner is possibly the greatest science fiction film ever put to screen. It is visually stunning, creating a bleak, dystopic vision of Los Angeles in 2019. It is a hybrid of genres, taking a science fiction story and forming itself as a film noir. It constantly uses visual cues, brilliant monologues, and a wonderful storyline to ask us to explore our humanity. And it is also the film that defined the importance of the director’s cut. Originally released in 1982 to mundane applause, Ridley Scott made his intended version of the film in 1992, away from Hollywood’s grasp, making Blade Runner into a cult classic.

The film begins with a title card telling us of our bleak future. It is 2019, and for years a giant corporation has been producing replicants, androids that are identical or greater in every single way to humans, including intelligence and physical capabilities. Used mainly for slave labor on off-world planets, replicants finally realized their own capabilities and began a mutiny. They were finally banned on Earth and “retired” by an elite group of police called blade runners. Rick Deckard, played by Harrison Ford (Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark), used to be one of these blade runners. Deckard’s adventure begins as five replicants come to Los Angeles, hoping to find a way to cure death, as replicants have an expiration date. Deckard, recovering from his divorce, is put back on the force with the task of hunting these men down, while closely being watched by a man named Gaff. The world is dark and grim, but Deckard seems to be unmoved by this, simply hoping to get his job done.

The vision of the future that Scott has set is breathtaking. The world is covered with lights and pollution, not a utopia as other directors have imagined. If Star Wars was the first to show an unclean future, Blade Runner took it to the extreme. Though some areas may be pristine perfect, other areas show Los Angeles as a dilapidated hole, not renovated in years. Scott also comments on the integration of Japanese culture into the United States. In the film, a majority of the population appears to be Japanese and most advertisements feature Japanese. In the 1980s, it was largely believed that Japan would overtake the United States in economic power, a belief still held today by many, and Blade Runner shows that fear and anxiety well.

Blade Runner also plays with the ideas between science fiction and film noir. Many influences of both classics like The Maltese Falcon or neo noir like Chinatown can be seen in this film. It is full of dark and shady visuals. We follow the film from a single protagonist (who in the original cut has a narration) that had a shady moral outlook. There is a femme fatale. The score is a mix of futuristic tones and jazz, as created by the famous Vangelis. And finally there is the question of corruption, seen by almost every person that dominates this screen.

Speaking of film noir and more specifically, femme fatales, the character of Rachael (Sean Young) is one that haunts my mind. While visiting the replicant corporation, the head introduces Rachael to Deckard as his secretary, but she is actually a replicant who doesn’t know her identity as one. Implanted with the memories of the boss’s niece, Rachael has no idea that her life is simply a machine. Which brings me to the major philosophy of this film. If Rachael, a woman who can love, emote, and have memories among other qualities, does not know she is simply a machine, how can we know what we are not? How can we perceive our reality as a human to be actually real?

Eyes play a major role in this film as a symbol for perception. The opening sequence is an eye reflected upon the city. People’s eyes light up. This is important for Scott’s film, because this is the medium in which we perceive our own reality. Our brain is designed to think that if we can see it, it is probably real. But in Blade Runner, we perceive Rachael originally to be real. Our eyes can deceive us, just as any body part of us can. We can only trust in the soul.

But the question that remains incontrovertible to the entire film is the reality of our main protagonist. Unlike most directors’ cuts, Scott only changed three small parts to his film. First he removed the narration the producers demanded he put in. Second, he removed the happy ending footage of Deckard and Rachael driving into the sun (which was actually extra footage from The Shining). And finally, he added a small scene where Deckard dreams about a unicorn. The importance of this dream can be seen at the end, when Gaff leaves a small origami of a unicorn outside his apartment. Gaff throughout the film leaves small origami figures like the unicorn to toy with Deckard’s emotions, but the unicorn proves that Gaff knows about his dream of the unicorn. And if Gaff knows without ever telling him, then his dreams may have all been implanted. Thus, the ultimate question of this film is: Could Deckard by a replicant?

It is a shocking revelation to think about it, but it makes complete sense if Deckard was simply created as a replicant to hunt other replicants. If film noirs are all about untrustworthy narrators, what is more perfect than a narrator who doesn’t know he isn’t human? But what does this mean for us as an audience? It’s a shock to think about Rachael’s existence but if our main character, a man we have come to trust for the last two hours, was nothing but another corporate machine sent to do a human’s job, how can we trust our own reality? What makes us human? What separates man from machine?

The other major intellectual fight is the one for immortality. Our antagonist for the picture is Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), the leader and wisest of the replicants. Roy wants nothing more than to stop the expiration date he is designed with. It is this fight for survival, for human existence, for preserving one’s memories that remain the emotional heart of this film. The final monologue by Roy is one that amazes me every time: “I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.” I find Batty to be the most complex character, and maybe the most well developed antagonist in any film I have ever seen.

Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner is an epic and philosophical science fiction masterpiece that will probably never be equaled. This is a film that I find perplexing every single time, and makes me wish I could somehow assert my humanity to the world. But as Scott suggests, it is impossible to assert our own humanity. There is no way we can ever know we are truly human. But this is not just a philosophical film, Scott has used visuals, motifs, and a film noir story to adapted to his theories on life, death, and meaning. Blade Runner is one of those few films that will be etched into your mind for years to come, a masterpiece of the highest magnitude, responding to the mind through entertainment, visual appeal, and philosophical terms.

Peter Labuza
Film Club Co-President