Goemon (2009)

One of the many temptations of the CGI revolution in movie making is to fall into Can You Top This mode. In America, we have seen it in the steadily increasing reliance on effects in the Marvel and DC universe movies, James Cameron’s invention of a complete universe like Avatar, so that many actors have commented or complained that they never saw anything but a green screen while filming. Kazuaki Kiriya, Japan’s inventor of the green screen film, found himself in the same groove almost immediately after the success of Casshern, which was itself a collection of movie clichés drawn from uncountable sources. In Goemon, he decides to take on the entire history of Japan from the death of Nobunaga Oda in 1582 to the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600.

He opts to anchor this around Goemon, a mix of the legendary Robin Hood thief and the Goemon character introduced by Raizo Ichikawa in Shinobi no mono, the movie that started the ninja craze. Not content to stop there, he adds another ninja friend Saizo who has become an enemy and a love story with the Lady Yodo-dono, also known as Chacha. On top of that he adds a production design that is a wild mixture of European gothic and the Chinese look of Tsui Hark on LSD, complimented by a music score by Akihiko Matsumoto that sounds like Patrick Doyle imitating a Hong Kong composer imitating Carl Orff.  As if that is not enough, he adds the dizzying speed, abrupt cuts, and tonal changes of Baz Luhrmann. The result is arguably the worst movie in Japanese film history since the Occupation years.

This is an overstatement, of course. There are obviously a lot of worse movies, from Shin-Toho horror films to Nikkatsu B and C borderless action movies to innumerable pinku films, but they had no ambition to be good. And none of them sent the audience out into the light with their eyes bleeding.

Though the story line is Japanese history, you would never know it by looking. The portrait of Oda looks like a Spanish conquistador. No one in the movie wears Japanese dress (though a katana does occasionally play its part) despite the opportunity for splendor provided by the unique Japanese armor of history; medieval European armor is worn by most of the warriors. Hideyoshi’s costume looks like something intended for Ming the Merciless but rejected because it was too over-the-top. Chacha sometimes appears in a bustle, suggesting Kiriya thought about steam-punk but forgot about it when the next idea popped into his head, only to suddenly remember it when Hideyoshi unveils gigantic cannons and an even larger Gatling gun. The primary inspiration seems to be Chinese, with reds upon reds in crowd scenes and gold, red, and black in costumes (all colors that will stand out against the green screen). Kiriya never passes up an opportunity to be bigger, more amazing, from the thousands of people in the square, to a parade of fantastic animals illuminated from within, to a safe door the size of Kansas, to a castle of about a hundred stories, to a fleet setting out to invade Korea that would challenge the Spanish Armada, to vast armies massing for Sekigahara like the final battles of Lord of the Rings.

But the greatest problem lies in the nature of CGI itself. The stunning acrobatics and swordplay of the great Hong Kong action films, on which the fights of Goemon are obviously modeled, were (and remain) so amazing and entertaining because the audience couldn’t imagine how what we saw was even possible with live actors. With the advent of CGI, we just say, “oh, that was CGI,” so Goemon’s fantastic leaps and chases inspire no wonder. It is little more than cartooning pretending to be live action. Goemon and Chacha’s childhood secret place, a valley full of waterfalls and fireflies, invoke no gasps at their beauty because we know it is all false, but without the open theatricality of Japanese films of the fifties and sixties. The armies provide no sense of danger or of real battle, as for example in War and Peace or Waterloo, much less Heaven and Earth, Ran, and Kagemusha, all of which used hundreds of extras.  

Within all this sensory overload, there is not much room for characters, despite the vast number of respected actors in the cast. Nevertheless, most of the cast give it their all. Yosuke Eguchi as Goemon is an action hero in the American mold, with a ready quip whenever he is in danger (not all of these work in subtitles, though the subtitler makes a noble effort to make his dialogue sound like a mix of Bruce Willis and James Bond). Uiji Kudo is the villain of villains as Hideyoshi, and a set of familiar faces do what they can with the brief cliches they are given, while Ryoko Hirosue as Chacha is cute and loveable as required but gives no hint of the iron lady that her historical counterpoint would turn out to be.

However we look at it, the movie is all about the CGI. It is spectacular, flamboyant, and relentless. The interior scenes, from castle to hovel, all seem to be green-screened, as do the street scenes set among the common folk, and even the grass itself appears to be CGI work. Whenever there is a chance for a brief scene of real emotion, it is overlaid with a new color filter.

It is always unfair to criticize a movie for what it is not rather than for what it is. However, in this case, it seems fair (to me at least) to do so. Hideyoshi is in many ways the most interesting of the late war lords, a man of many contradictions. As far as I have found, he has never featured in his own movie, though he was the central figure in the 1996 taiga drama on TV. Though born a peasant, he became a right-hand man of Oda and managed to keep the country from falling back into civil war after Oda’s assassination, though he never officially became Shogun. He launched major building programs, including the famous Osaka castle. He established the tradition of the tea ceremony, yet ultimately ordered the tea-master Sen no Rikyu to commit suicide. He executed Catholic missionaries and confiscated swords from the general populace, insuring there would be no successful peasant uprisings and guaranteeing the place of the samurai at the top of the social order, while also making sure there would be no more peasants to follow him up the ladder. His invasion of Korea reached all the way into Manchuria before a Korean navy managed to cut his supply lines. Lady Chacha actually bore him two sons, the second of which was designated heir when Hideyoshi died of apparently natural causes, not an assassination by Goemon, in 1598. All of these events have been covered in many other movies, but Hideyoshi was always a secondary character. A hint of what might have been can be found in a scene in which Hideyoshi tells Goemon how his childhood poverty made him so hungry that he could never be satisfied, a scene that would be a lot more powerful were it not played on a balcony about a thousand feet high with a huge CGI city laid out beneath them.

Likewise, Japan had a great legacy of both subtle elegance and of garish design and performance, from the exotic armor so effectively utilized by Kurosawa to the masks of Noh to Kabuki itself to the over-the-top fashion world of the geisha. To so completely reject this in favor of a mix of Chinese and Flash Gordon imagery seems like a magnificent opportunity wasted, at the very least. Nevertheless, the movie made money, though not as much as expected or hoped, coming only 25^th among Japanese features of the year, behind a wad of anime, movies based on TV series, and teen romances. Its box office gross in Japan was only a quarter of John Woo’s Red Cliffs, about a similar subject in Chinese history, and embarrassingly less than the Richard Gere remake of Hachiko. CGI films would not die afterwards, any more than they did in America, for Shin Godzilla, The Eternal Zero, and Godzilla Minus One, among others, still lie in the future. If you want CGI shoved in your face every second, this is a movie for you.