This movie grabs you right from the beginning with its audio/visual bombardment that keeps your eyes and ears at maximum capacity. This doesn't last all the way through, there's interspersed moments of artistic pause. Those frozen moment scenes looked like a master's canvas come to motion, if not life. Don't blink.
The plot of the movie revolves around a battle of life and death, with the love story subplot on the main character. As many scripts set in Japan do, they revolve the drama around "honor" and whatever twisted concept the characters have of it. Often "honor" demands that everyone dies. A lot of people die, but the violence is pretty good, more conceptual than graphic, and it delivers its intended impact well. But it eventually gets over the top, and you start wondering if anyone is going to live.
There's more than a few plot-holes, and they are big enough to drive a Honda through. You get the idea they shot reels of film and thought about how to piece it together afterward. People do things for impossible reasons, and unlikely motivations (twisted sense of honor becomes a generic excuse). To their credit, with such a twisted plot piecing together scenes, they don't make the mistake of turning the plot on a dime anywhere, so you won't get lost. You know who the bad guys are (3 different groups!) and who the good guys are (the hero, his immediate family, and all innocents), and you know who it's going to come down to in the end.
To anyone who watches this with subtitles, blame the incoherent reasons behind character's actions on bad subtitle translations.... and it becomes a better than average movie, even good. Turn out the lights and crank the volume. Sci-Fi fans, this is a don't miss.
