I got a new shipment from Red Sun, my favorite Asian DVD importers, the other day, containing three films: “20th Century Boys,” “Shaolin Girl” (complete with CD soundtrack!), and “Ichi,” a female take on the Zatoichi saga. Finally got around to watching the first of them, the domestic box-office smash “20th Century Boys,” and it’s an enjoyably silly, increasingly preposterous cross between “Stand by Me,” the first season of “Heroes,” and the Book of Revelations.
After a puzzling framing scene set in 2015, the movie bounces back and forth between 1969, when a group of adolescent friends formed a secret club and wrote a Book of Prophecies, and 1997, when those apocalyptic prophecies seem, bizarrely, to be coming true, potentially culminating with the end of the world on December 31, 2000.
The opening, future-set scene introduces Prisoner 1498, a onetime comic artist now imprisoned in a hellish dungeon, apparently for something he published on the Web. It’s the unseen, clawed monster in the neighboring cell, though, who narrates the story of the film, which begins as a teenaged Kenji Endo blasts T. Rex and proclaims the power of rock’n’roll to change lives.
That, of course, was
in 1969; the adult Kenji has abandoned his guitar-hero dreams and works in a KingMart
convenience store alongside his mother, while caring for the baby girl his
sister abandoned into his care. After
the police come by to inquire about a frequent customer, a professor named
Shikishima who has gone missing, Kenji visits his home to collect an
outstanding delivery bill. On an outside
wall he glimpses a symbol composed of a hand with its index finger extended, over
an eye. Kenji’s mother has
been reading in the newspaper of a viral epidemic in Africa which drains its
victims’ blood, so when he learns that a student of Shikishima’s has been found
dead and bloodless, things start to look suspicious.
When Kenji attends his high school reunion, he reconnects with most of his old gang, and they wax nostalgic about the hours spent in their secret hideout, living in fear of local bullies The Terrible Twins. It got so bad that the boys hired the toughest kid they knew, a tomboy named Yukiji, as their bodyguard. The reunion is dominated by talk of an enigmatic cult, led by someone known only as Friend, who pushes a prophecy identical to that invented by Kenji and company thirty years earlier, and incorporates the same hand-eye symbol the kids invented.
Convinced that Friend must be someone from their childhood circle, the reconnected friends are further unnerved by vague hints that Kenji’s infant niece, Kanna, is somehow important, and by the unexpected death-by-falling of Donkey, a member of the circle who wasn’t at the reunion. They also recall, through flashback, a creepy masked kid named Sadakiyo who always used to spy on their group. It all ties into the moon landing from that summer of ’69 as well; when Friend finally appears and speaks, his first words to an adoring crowd are “I am Collins,” a reference to Michael Collins, the Apollo 11 astronaut who didn’t get to set foot on the lunar surface.
Yukiji, it turns out, is an all-grown-up woman now, working customs enforcement at Narita Airport. When she sees the gang’s logo in cult-related news, she seeks out Kenji and reminds him that it was their friend Otcho who designed it. Otcho, unfortunately, vanished in Thailand years ago. As Kenji learns more about the cult of Friend, it becomes clear that everything he wrote in his childhood Book of Prophecies is coming true (including the laser gun he designed back then!). London is struck by the blood-draining plague, then Osaka. When a massive terrorist attack strikes a Tokyo airport, things seem clearly to be getting out of control.
After the cult tries to kidnap the baby Kanna, and burns down the KingMart in the process, Kenji has had enough. He uses the laser gun to hijack the stage at a Friend concert from the terrible glam band opening act, standing up for himself and reclaiming his rock’n’roll mojo in one fell swoop. He discovers the all-important juvenilia under the charred remains of the convenience store. From there the final act of “20th Century Boys” ramps up the intensity, revealing the unlikely fate of Otcho, the emergence of Friend’s cult as a national political force, a life-size bunny costume, and, in the last half-hour or so, some truly apocalyptic shit.
It’s an absurdly over-plotted story (which betrays its manga origins) that, like so many Hollywood action films, feels as if it could have been written by children. In a meta-sense, of course, it was, and if there’s any deeper meaning to the film, it lies there. Otherwise, its main virtue is how earnestly its many characters take the absurd situations in which they find themselves. After all, this conspiracy makes “The Da Vinci Code” look eminently plausible. But if anything seems confusing after the end credits, it’ll surely be cleared up in one of the two remaining films in the planned trilogy, which I must say I’ll anticipate, just to see how they deal with the rather drastic end of this one.
2008 release, 142 minutes, in Japanese with English subtitles
Grade: B