Before We Vanish

There's a lot of crappy Japanese sci-fi out there so this was a pleasant surprise. The music gets a little hokey occasionally but I was impressed with the acting, direction, and cinematography. As alien body-possession, other-dimensional movies go, this was enjoyable.

Three star said it was boring - they're wrong - it's worse than boring. The storyline plot premise of aliens taking over human bodies to conquer the planet or whatever has many past iterations/forms all of which made an alien presence somewhat believable. In this case all we get are humans acting (actually stilted acting with lots of stilted talking) like narcissistic superficial humans - just talking about themselves. In the beginning there was a bloody (not shown - just aftermath) of daughter killing parents which made no sense and nothing came of it and then later a few scenes of brief gun battles between an alien human and humans and finally little fire balls coming down that was suppose to represent aliens invading (the special effects part).

Seen at the Viennale 2017: At the beginning I liked this movie. I like the succinct dialogues that appear to be very often a trademark of Japanese movies. But with ongoing time, I sat in the cinema thinking: come on!, we got it, please show us the next scene. I did not look for the time. But it became a pain. Very often I thought, okay now comes the logical end. But no. Another intermediate dialogue had to be followed. And another one. And another one. At the end I was really exhausted.

So I do not know the novel or have I read it. But the movie is quite interesting and it really has some enticing ideas it explores. It may not be as engaging as some might think or want it to be, but it is more than decent. Now there are many ideas and quite a few interesting revelations society wise - and commentary overall about how we live and what we fear.

Having said that, this is not flashy, but quite brutal and violent. You should not have a problem with that. The pacing and the accessibility to the characters may feel all over the place, but it adds to the overall flair of the movie. A fine watch, which is very weird and flawed ...

I very much enjoyed "Before we Vanish" at Serbia's FEST2018, the premise of an alien invasion allowing the film to stage an entertaining but believable depiction of humans robbed of very specific parts of their brains, namely the supposed segments which would contain ideas such as "property" and "self". Despite running for over 2 hours it stayed on course til the end, even against ever-escalating violence, and delivered a nice payoff with an ending worth talking about.

The predominantly youthful cast had fun with the script, in itself already full of laughs, though it never wandered off into goofiness for the sake of it. Really my only complaint of the whole experience regarded the person sitting next to my girlfriend, a college-student-looking dude who at first glance seemed like the best type of person to be sitting next to in the theater, making use of his time before the lights went out to read a very old looking book; only to disappoint us and many others in the venue by not making it more than thirty seconds without letting out a sneeze, cough or long sniffle. Even so, this seriously ill person managed to have a few chuckles of his own, supporting the film's notion that men left without crucial concepts like "contagion", "karma" or "decency" could still live enjoyable, if oblivious, lives.