by eabaker » Fri Mar 22, 2013 3:51 pm
I don't feel like Final Wars is embracing its own absurdity, I feel like it's dismissing the possiblity of being anything but absurd. I find it condescending to its genre and its audience. The, "Somehow we escaped!" moment you cite is a perfect example of this. That's not embracing absurdity - embracing absurdity would entail showing the audience an absurd escape - so much as an open declaration that storytelling doesn't matter at all.
I'm not saying that was anyone's intent, but it is the sensation the movie evokes in me.
Which would still be something I could forgive, if I didn't find pretty much every stylistic aspect of the movie so gratingly obnoxious.
Ultimately, I don't care that much whether it's a good movie or a bad movie (I've made the case on another board that it can be read as a kind of experimental film, and isn't strictly subject to traditional standards of narrative cinema); it's a movie that visually, rhythmically, and auraully annoys me.
Tokyo, a smoldering memorial to the unknown, an unknown which at this very moment still prevails and could at any time lash out with its terrible destruction anywhere else in the world.