The Unsatisfying "Terra Formars" is Takashi Miike's Weakest Film of the Decade

Takashi Miike has been a reliable go-to director for Japanese blockbuster cinema since 2010, releasing between two and three films every year of this current decade, equally achieving creative success as well as commercial. He rocked the foreign arthouse world with his samurai epic 13 Assassins (2010), and followed it up with a respectable remake of Masaki Kobayashi's 1962 masterpiece in Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai (2011). Likely to be dismissed for remaking one of the all-time greats, Hara-Kiri is a dazzlingly colourful palette of heightened melodrama. Zebraman 2: Attack of Zebra City (2010), a meta-sequel to his 2004 family film, is a Joe Dante-style mockery of superhero and science fiction cinema, set with a black and white striped totalitarian metropolitan wherein a Lady Gaga-like figure rules everything. Ninja Kids!!! (2011) is an energetic children's movie with an onslaught of humourous slapstick and visual gags. Lowbrow humour and family-friendly entertainment never hold back Miike, as shown here and in the previously mentioned Zebraman (2004). Ace Attorney (2012) is a bona fide masterpiece; the most cinematically alive live-action recreation or adaptation of any video game to date, with framing, cutting, colour arrangements and humour that understand the visual language of games maybe better than any other movie. For Love's Sake (2012) is one-third a feel-good Katakuris-esque musical extravaganza, that cleverly ditches genre expectation to become “A Takashi Miike Movie”, throwing its characters under the bus so Miike can return to his career-long musings on the relationship between human beings and the violence they create. Lesson of the Evil (2012) is almost too sick of a movie to categorize, most closely resembling a black comedy slasher. It's a cynical piece that some would call nihilistic, but I think Miike's got too much humanity in him to ever cater to nihilism. His films can get angry, but there's always a shred of hope. Shield of Straw (2013) is one of his most mainstream efforts, a cop and crook thriller that's reminiscent of later-years Tony Scott. It's tightly crafted excitement that only stumbles when it enters its final act. The Mole Song: Undercover Agent Reiji (2013) is Miike's 1000^th yakuza picture, but whenever he returns to the familiar genre today, he has something new to offer. Mole Song gets comic books like Ace Attorney gets video games, and it's astonishing to see Miike's cinematic craft of utilizing multimedia techniques rise above his peers. Over Your Dead Body (2014) is an occasionally stunning exercise in horror, another genre that he knows as well as the back of his hand. When it sticks to genre, it excels, but it's a little dry in its diversions. As the Gods Will (2014) borrows from video game structure to tell a story that combines Japanese folklore, life-or-death survival games, and reality television to create a stunning work of pop that I've never seen anything like before. Lion Standing Against the Wind (2015) is one of the strangest movies Miike's ever made, in that it's one of his most normal, a straight-laced drama about a doctor trying to save war-torn African children. It's effecting, if sometimes a little too schmaltzy. Yakuza Apocalypse (2015) is a thoughtful callback his early 2000s crime movies (which produced some of his all-time greats like Dead or Alive II, Deadly Outlaw Rekka and Graveyard of Honor) made utilizing his 2010s production values, which is a win-win situation. If it was the last yakuza film he ever made (it's not), it would be a lovely swansong to the genre that made his career, and culmination of his complicated feelings on toxic masculinity and violent human nature.

These 13 films range from very good to all-time favourites of mine. It's been the most creatively consistent period in Miike's career. While directing a great film or two every year in the late 1990s and early 2000s, he was releasing five, six, seven a year, and quality sometimes suffered. He was working in lower budgets, much quicker production schedules; he had more freedom and less time. Scripts were sometimes not all there, or casting didn't come together. And Miike himself simply wasn't as experienced back then as he is now. And when you're making a new movie every couple months, it doesn't matter how talented you are, not everything will be good. There was usually a clunker or two every year.

In 2017 Miike will be releasing film adaptations of Blade of the Immortal and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, two manga franchises that are a perfect fit for him, each one catered almost too perfectly to a genre or style that he has previously mastered. At the end of 2016 he'll release The Mole Song 2, which too should be good. The first one is strong and he has a good history with sequels (Young Thugs, Nostalgia, Dead or Alive 2, Zebraman 2, even Crows Zero 2 is as passably entertaining as Crows Zero). Unfortunately this streak of his this decade has a blemish. And that blemish's name is Terra Formars (2016).

Terra Formars is an adaptation of a very successful manga series, currently ongoing. Miike's directed tons of manga movies before, but none as popular as Terra Formars, at least to my Western perspective. The majority of the manga that have been made into Miike films have never been given official English translations or North American printings, but you'll find Terra Formars in any Canadian comic book store or regular book store (that sells comics). It's a high profile property and I wonder if it was Miike's largest production/highest budget movie to date (I'm not at all skilled in finding budget information on Japanese films in English-language internet, and am pretty useless at trying to navigate Japanese-language internet).

The film drops its exposition in a narrated opening scene. Earthlings wanted to colonize Mars, but first the atmosphere had be altered to breathable, livable conditions to humans. In the 21^st century they sent a bunch of cockroaches and mold to Mars. The mold would absorb the sunlight, and would then feed on the insect corpses to survive. Jump to the year 2577 and the first expedition of astronauts lands on Mars. The 6 crew members are killed by giant humanoid cockroaches, who not only survived but mutated into super strong monsters. Before they are killed they sent a message back home. Knowing the risks involved now, the colonization program has put together a group of convicted criminals to challenge the cockroaches. It's a suicide mission, but those on the team are all too dumb to realize it. It's like if someone fused Starship Troopers with Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, only without any of either property's social commentary or wit. There are ideas here that could be explored, particularly ones close to Miike. There's a pacifist story that's just dying to be told with this premise, and maybe the manga tells it. Humans are once again trying to destroy a race of natives to colonize their home land, and the metaphor is made so blatant by making them cockroaches. “Why do you kill a cockroach? Because it exists.” The film acknowledges a message here, but never digs deeper.

A major problem with Terra Formars is its cockroach monster design. In the manga, the aliens are undeniably a racist caricature of black people, the black and white comic shading them in all black, appropriating stereotypical body language more commonly associated with rap music, exaggerating body types in a manner similar to whenever black characters would show up in old animated shorts from Tom & Jerry and Loony Tunes. The protagonists could easily be identified as Caucasian. That the narrative so plainly paints this as good versus evil, white versus black story, with the former being the heroes, taints Terra Formars as a questionable entertainment. The film tries to do away with this issue the best it can without altering the cockroach body types instead opting for something more insectoid. They're coloured a sickly grey-green, so while no longer an obvious black caricature, even as a movie monster, they're not particularly effective, either. The computer-centric effects dilute the film aesthetic; the cockroaches so vaguely defined they don't appear to have texture. When one or few inhabit the scene, they almost get by on sheer creepy factor alone, but when it becomes an action heavy CGI fest with dozens of cockroaches painted on the screen, it becomes an eyesore. It's such a visually unappealing creature design. They're too goofy looking to be truly menacing, and too serious looking to work as camp.

Terra Formars, too, tries to juggle moods, with awkward shuffling of comedy, action, science-fiction and horror. Sometimes it briefly works and we get a glimpse at what Terra Formars could have looked like as a more assured movie. The human protagonists are each supplied with a special serum that when injected with, makes them transform Magical Girl-style into an insect-human hybrid with super strength to better combat the aliens. Each of these transformations is unique, and incorporates limb sprouting practical effects. It's gooey gross body horror, and illustrates the extreme lengths the heroes have to go through just to stack up against their enemy. Each character looks different, and their hybrid designs are fun. They're colourful, inspired, and look good in pose and in motion. Watching them combat their sterile assembly line opponent is a clashing sight.

Elsewhere, Terra Formars dig into camp, most notably with its Davey Havok-of-AFI cosplaying mission leader Honda, played by Shun Oguri. His character is safe on Earth and appears to the astronauts through holographic images giving them advice on their mission. His body and speech mannerisms are constantly dialed up to 11; a small movement of any limb becomes a body shaking experience. It's not nearly as nuanced or compelling a performance as say, Peter Sellers as the title character in Dr. Strangelove, though that role does look like an inspiration on this one.

The film runs about 105 minutes, and while it does feel too long as it currently stands, much of the tedium comes from a cast of undefined characters. 14 men and women are part of the suicide mission at Mars. Half of these characters are only given a couple lines before being slaughtered. A couple others are given some semblance of an arc, but are prematurely killed. There are only 2 characters who make it to the end of the movie, and they're just as flavourless as everyone else, even with a small backstory. Some characters are supposed to serve basic archetype functions, but they're written so paper thin they don't even accomplish that. The script is horrible to its characters; they stand, pose, deliver plot information, get thrown into battles, and most of them are killed in their first encounters with the cockroaches. It's supposed to make the enemy appear unstoppable and create tension, but it's tiresome to see potential characters thrown to the slaughter without a chance in hell. To steal a term from Star Trek fandom, every character is a Red Shirt. And the characters who somehow survive the ordeal are the Red Shirts who occasionally make it to the end. Even they're not given the same dignity as real characters. There is no Kirk or Spock on this mission.

The film is particularly cruel to its women, who are killed off faster and easier than the men. The first victim is a woman, and she is killed so early and so grotesquely it serves only shock value. There's one woman who is led to believe has died, only to come back, and die for real. No women survive the film.

The green-screen and CGI-heavy Terra Formars does not make for a great action movie. The backgrounds bare and the enemies texture-less can't help shake off that you're watching green-screen sequences, with bodies in motion who aren't actually coming into contact with each other. The battles aren't a complete failure, because Miike is a skilled craftsman and frames and cuts the battles with a stylistic flair. If there's one thing he aces in this movie, it's posing. There's plenty of cool heroic action poses in Terra Formars, which is damning in its own sort of way.

Visually, the Miike film Terra Formars has most in common with is one of his family affairs, Yatterman (2009). They both have a lot of Power Rangers-esque costumes and make-up, battle choreography, and clean colourful palettes. Terra Formar sometimes seems like it too wants to be a family movie, but then there are multiple sequences of the cockroaches literally pulling limbs off the humans while blood gushes. It's much too graphic for children. If softened, this could have been a recommendable movie for kids.

That's a problem that keeps resurfacing with Terra Formars: it isn't sure what it wants to be. It has glimpses of success at horror, action, comedy, science-fiction, and family entertainment. It has its moments of beauty and hints at what different superior versions of the film could have looked like, but in trying to be all at once, it ends up being not particularly great at any specific thing.