Casshern (2004)
Casshern arrives with a genuinely unusual pedigree. The source material is a 1973 Tatsunoko Production anime series, Casshan: Robot Hunter, which built a modest but loyal following in Japan on the strength of its pulpy, post-apocalyptic premise and its brooding cyborg hero. The property sat largely dormant for three decades before director Kazuaki Kiriya was handed the keys to a live-action adaptation, and the result, released in Japanese cinemas in April 2004, landed somewhere between a visual experiment and a mainstream blockbuster, polarising audiences and critics in roughly equal measure. To situate it properly: this was arriving in a post-Matrix world that had recently been flooded with hyper-stylised, CGI-heavy science fiction, and Kiriya was clearly aware of that context. What he made, though, feels less like a Hollywood imitation and more like something arrived at independently, its aesthetic closer to a fever-dream collage of early twentieth century propaganda imagery, retro-futurist architecture, and anime sensibility than anything coming out of Los Angeles at the time.
Kiriya himself is an interesting figure to have in the director's chair. He came to the project almost entirely from a background in music video direction, having built his reputation through visually elaborate work for Japanese pop acts including his then-partner Hikaru Utada. Casshern was his feature debut, and the ambition on display is considerable given that context. Tatsunoko Production, the originating studio, co-produced the picture, and while exact budget figures were not widely publicised, the production was reported to be among the more expensive Japanese domestic films of its era, a fact that is evident on screen whether or not every yen was well spent. The screenplay, co-written by Kiriya alongside Shotaro Suga and Dai Sato, attempts to layer the original anime's relatively straightforward hero narrative with weighty themes around war, nationalism, environmental collapse, and the ethics of science. It is, to put it charitably, an ambitious reach. For a point of comparison on how Japanese cinema handles large-scale period and genre material with very different results, it is worth looking at Ran (1985), where Kurosawa demonstrates the discipline that can make epic storytelling land with real force.
The principal cast brings considerable experience to what are, on the page, fairly archetypal roles. Yûsuke Iseya plays Tetsuya Azuma, the fallen soldier reborn as the cyborg Casshern, and he carries the physical demands of the role with a kind of haunted stillness that suits the character's ambiguous moral position. Kumiko Aso, well known to Japanese audiences from her work in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's horror pictures (including Ring-era J-horror), plays Luna, and she brings a fragile emotional register to the film's more human scenes. Akira Terao and Kanako Higuchi, both with substantial theatrical and screen credentials, take the parental roles of Professor and Mrs Azuma, lending a certain gravitas to the film's more melodramatic passages. Fumiyo Kohinata rounds out the central ensemble as a military commander whose allegiances are never entirely comfortable. On paper it is a cast capable of serious dramatic work. Whether the material allows them to deliver it consistently is another matter, and one that speaks to a broader tension running through the whole production between visual ambition and narrative coherence. The film also sits interestingly alongside other anime-to-live-action experiments of the period, not least Sukiyaki Western Django (2007), where Takashi Miike similarly tested the limits of stylisation as a substitute for grounded storytelling.
Kazuaki Kiriya’s 2004 live-action sci-fi epic Casshern is a film I first checked out right around its original release. Back then, I was absolutely blown away by it, largely because an old comic book artist mate of mine had heavily recommended it, going as far as to call it the visually best movie of all time.
The premise is undeniably massive: after fifty years of brutal war between the Great Eastern Federation and Europa, Earth is left a toxic, uninhabitable wasteland ravaged by biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons. When Professor Azuma’s "neo-cell" project goes horribly wrong, spawning mutants that declare war on humanity, his fallen son Tetsuya is reborn as the cyborg Casshern to save what's left of us.
Now, looking at it through a modern lens, I can completely understand where my mate was coming from regarding the visual spectacle. Kiriya, who cut his teeth on groundbreaking visual effects, has crafted a world that is undeniably ambitious and dripping with striking, hyper-stylised imagery. The production design, the blending of CGI with practical sets, and the sheer scale of the post-apocalyptic landscapes are a testament to the massive amount of graft that went into the picture. It’s a bold, fever-dream adaptation of the 1973 anime that swings for the fences, creating a deeply immersive, if occasionally overwhelming, aesthetic experience that still manages to turn heads today.
However, I have to say: time has simply not been kind to Casshern, and it has aged rather badly. The biggest culprit is the incredibly poor pacing. It takes nearly 45 agonising minutes before our titular hero actually shows up on screen, leaving you to wade through a dense, exposition-heavy setup that really tests your patience. When the action finally kicks in, the narrative itself feels like an absolute mess of a story. It’s so packed with heavy themes, philosophical musings, and convoluted lore that it completely loses its emotional core, leaving the plot feeling disjointed and hard to follow.
Casshern is a fascinating, deeply flawed piece of early 2000s sci-fi that is saved from being a total write-off by its sheer, unadulterated ambition. Kazuaki Kiriya clearly had a massive, visionary concept in his head, and the visual flair is still undeniably impressive when it hits the mark. It might not be the flawless masterpiece my old comic book mate swore it was, and the narrative wobbles definitely drag it down, but it remains a highly watchable, slightly positive curiosity for fans of the genre.
It’s a beautifully chaotic, visually striking mess that proves you can have the best-looking film in the world, but you still need a tight script to make it a true classic.
Casshern remains one of those films that film culture has not quite decided what to do with. It sits awkwardly between cult artefact and cautionary tale, too visually singular to dismiss and too narratively unwieldy to fully champion. For anyone with an interest in the early 2000s wave of Japanese genre cinema, or in what happens when a music video director is handed an epic canvas and told to fill it, it is worth two and a bit hours of your time, even when those hours are testing. If it leaves you curious about where Japanese animation and live-action storytelling intersect more successfully, Pokémon the Movie: Mewtwo Strikes Back, Evolution (2019) offers a very different but instructive point of comparison. Casshern is, in the end, a film that looks like nothing else and coheres like almost nothing at all, which is either its tragedy or its charm, depending on your patience for beautiful, organised chaos.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2004 | Watched: 2026-07-08
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