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 t's no surprise at all that Ryuhei Kitamura chose
"Alive" as his first film post-"Versus".
Whereas that low-budget zombie/yakuza film was a meshing of hyper kinetic chaos
and stylized action, "Alive" is a slightly bigger budget attempt at
"Cube"-like
tension and atmosphere. Unfortunately for Kitamura, while he may very well be
the next John Woo when it comes to cool action, he is no Vincenzo Natali when it
comes to creating tension and atmosphere out of very little.
Hideo Sakaki (the "villain" from "Versus")
plays Tenshu, a condemned murderer whose date with the electric chair ends with
Tenshu still alive. Now "officially" dead, Tenshu is given the option
of doing the whole electric chair thing for real or participate in an experiment
and live -- at least for a while. Tenshu agrees to door number two and ends up
in a secret military installation with another condemned man who took the same
option. This fellow, unfortunately, is insane, and was condemned for good
reasons -- he's a serial killer with dozens of female victims under his belt.
Tenshu, by comparison, was condemned for killing the men who raped his
girlfriend.
For its first 40 minutes, Kitamura and the screenplay
(based on the manga comic book by Tsutomu Takahashi) refuses to let us know what
is going on. We see scientist types watching the two prisoners' every move from
an adjacent room and controlling everything that happens inside the large metal
room the two prisoners are housed in. As the days tick by, the scientists seem
to be pushing the prisoners to kill each other -- but for what purpose? Or more
importantly, why are we forced to sit through 40 minutes that, by the 45-minute
mark, seems to have very little relevance to the rest of the movie's plot?
Once the "Cube"-like
nature of "Alive" gets tossed out the window in favor of CGI and talks
about alien conspiracies, we are finally allowed in on the movie's actual plot.
We learn that the prisoners are being subjected to conditions meant to spur them
into manic violence, and thus lure some sort of "alien infection" out
of an infected woman and into one of them. The infected woman shows up out of
nowhere, locked in her own glass cage that, although she's supposed to be
infected with an entity that gives her "unlimited" power, she can't
seem to break out of. (Might want to rethink that whole "unlimited
power" thing then, no?)
Soon one of those Shady Government Officials working for a
Shady Government Agency arrives to take over the project, proclaiming his
intentions to use the alien as -- Can
you guess? No? Why, the Shady Government Official wants the alien for the same
reason all Movie Shady Government Officials want to capture aliens -- as
potential weapons, silly! As a bone to American viewers, or maybe just fans of
UFO movies, the film manages to screwball the U.S. Government into being
involved in the conspiracy, which means -- drumroll, please -- Area 51 gets an
honorable mention! (What's an alien movie without someone mentioning Area 51,
after all.)
Which leads to this: for a Kitamura movie,
"Alive" offers up some strangely uninteresting action. The
fights seem perfunctory, as if the producers demanded that Kitamura add action
when he didn't want to. As a result, the action sequences are dull and drab,
just like the set construction of the singular room the prisoners are kept in.
If you know your science fiction and guessed that the set is basically the set
designers painting everything metallic silver and decorating the walls with
arbitrary red lights and bright white fluorescents, then give yourself brownie
points. And apparently someone forgot to clean the camera lens -- or is that
just fancy aesthetics? Nevermind.
The other big letdown with "Alive" is that it's
just so blasted...unoriginal. Even the action sequences in the second
half consists of scenes stolen from other movies. Kitamura, an admitted fan of
James Cameron's oeuvre, has apparently been dying to redo the scene from
Cameron's "Aliens"
where the Marines are attacked inside the alien hub. The scene consists of
supposedly macho Marines running around like chickens with their heads cut off
as the aliens pick them off one by one. Here, we get a group of supposedly macho
Faceless Government Agents who runs around like chickens with their heads cut
off as Tenshu, now powered by the alien entity, picks them off one by one. As if
that wasn't enough, there's even a pipe-through-the-chest kill courtesy of
"Commando".
The thing about "Alive" is that it's full of
untapped potential. Even the film's second half, which is filled with action,
still managed to find long stretches where nothing happens, and people
are either just sitting or standing around chatting about their past and
whatnot. In the end, I suppose Kitamura boxed himself in with the intention of
testing himself, trying to prove that he can direct without resorting to
fisticuffs every other second. Unfortunately Kitamura is wrong. He can't
direct without resorting to fisticuffs every other second, and when he tries,
the movie is just a big lump of...well, it's just a big lump of not much
anything.
"Alive" is a terribly dull, dreadfully
uninteresting, and impossibly generic film. And judging by the far superior
"Azumi",
Kitamura's film post-"Alive", the director must have come to the
realization that he does, indeed, need fisticuffs to erupt every other second.
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