Review: Blame! (Movie)
(November 2018)
Rating: 6/10
Twenty years ago, the cyberpunk cult manga “BLAME!” began its serialization run. Tsutomu Nihei’s debut work was a dark, violent epic featuring a gunman on a quest to restore humanity’s control over the Net. Nihei employed a distinctive art style to depict the labyrinthine city, with its gigantic, towering structures and outlandish inhabitants, and backed it up with sparse, terse dialogue in order to maintain the manga’s nightmarish atmosphere.
In 2003, a few ONAs adapting certain scenes of the manga were released, and were deservedly forgotten. Last year, however, Netflix released a feature-length film adaptation, mostly based on the “Electro-Fishers” arc. The question I want to answer here is this: “Notwithstanding Tsutomu Nihei’s involvement as ‘Creative Consultant’, does the Netflix film do justice to the manga?” The short answer is “No”. And I’ll use the rest of the review to explain my point of view.
I want to start by stating that I’m not a purist - my problem with the film isn’t that the filmmakers frequently deviated from the source material, but that some of these deviations have had a very negative effect on the quality of their adaptation.
Most of this film’s praise goes to the graphics, which were very impressive. True, the visual design for the characters and their city isn’t as dark or distinctive as the original, but it’s high quality nonetheless. It reminded me of Mamoru Oshii’s 2004 film “Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence”, and sure enough I found out that the same studio (Polygon Pictures) was responsible for both films.
Killy:
The main character is given a corny “tough guy” character redesign, complete with a square jaw and pumped-up physique. This is in contrast to the “metalhead highschooler” depiction of the manga, which gives the impression of a man more reliant on inner determination than physical strength. His Western shooting theme adds to the corniness, as does the swirling smoke around him (reminiscent of the swirling dust in old Westerns) which is accompanied by yet another Western heroic theme in the “final farewell” scene.
Killy also speaks as if drugged and, aside from combat scenes, moves like a zombie. Enhancing the impression of a reanimated corpse are the unexplained neck injections he administers to himself every now and then, and which are, by the way, nowhere to be found in the manga.
Cibo and the Electro-Fishers:
The characters of the original manga are custom-made for their world, and what is sacrificed in depth is made up for by an intense focus on the world and its dynamics, delivered using the device of “What would happen if a gunman undertook a mission to look for the key to controlling the Net?”. The filmmakers restructured the source material according to a traditional blueprint: the characters are placed at the forefront, along with the plot, while the world serves as the background.
One of the biggest changes introduced in the movie was a shift in perspective: the main point of view became that of the Electro-Fishers instead of Killy. A lot of good effort went into giving them fleshed-out characters, but there were a couple of problems:
- The melodrama was sometimes piled on a bit too thick - the tragic scenes milked for all they’re worth. In the manga, the city’s inhabitants rarely show strong emotions, and appear accustomed to the violence and brutality that plague their world. This fosters a feeling of fatalistic dread in the reader. It’s an uncommon style of characterization, and its examples are few and far between (one of them is “Texhnolyze”, another cyberpunk work of art). This contrasts with the emphasis the mainstream places on stirring empathy on behalf of the characters. In principle, there’s nothing wrong with the characters engaging the viewer through the strong emotions they display, as long as they don’t stray far into melodrama territory as we’ve seen happen in this film.
- In the manga, the most important characters after Killy are Cibo and Sana-kan, who are both strong, influential female characters. However, following the edicts of American identity politics, Netflix also moved the Electro-Fisher female characters to the forefront, in an obvious quota-filling, checkbox-ticking manner.
The Plot:
A lot of good effort also went into adapting the plot, which was based on the Electro-Fishers arc, while borrowing elements from other arcs and heavily modifying Cibo’s storyline.
Unfortunately, it suffers from a major hole. When Killy asks Cibo: “Do you know any humans who have the Net Terminal Gene?”, she answers: “If there were any humans like that, then this city would have been made functional ages ago”. Of course the reasoning in Cibo’s answer renders Killy’s whole journey worthless. What makes it bizarre is that Killy doesn’t object to or even question her reasoning, but promptly resumes his search for the genes after he parts ways with Cibo and the Electro-Fishers. But I guess that, after all, is what you should expect of a zombie.
I don’t regret watching the movie, but I’m not looking forward to its planned sequel.