Assault Girls (2009)

It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

This is ultimately a movie about the very bad things that can happen when we don't address our unease, when we just try to brush it off, whether that's to fit in or to preserve our self-image.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

Four hardcore gamers are forced to cast aside their differences and work together in order to defeat a giant sand worm monster in a computer simulated virtual reality world. Sounds like a really cool and fun premise, right? Well, it just ain't. Writer/director Mamoru Oshii gets the picture off to a cracking start with the gnarly CGI monsters, striking shots of a bleak desolate landscape, and rip-roaring action scenes. However, the movie runs out of gas early on and becomes bogged down in an increasingly tedious and tiresome brooding existential moodiness that strives for profoundness only to wind up coming across as extremely boring, irritating, and pretentious instead. The meandering and repetitious narrative goes around in circles just like the thinly drawn characters trudging through this ordeal. While Oshii does deliver several stunning visuals (one girl gamer sprouts wings and takes flight in a particularly breathtaking image), the annoying bickering between these unlikable individuals with one-note personalities, the draggy pacing, a frustratingly lame'n'abrupt ending, and the general mind-numbing ennui make this film a serious chore to endure. Worst of all, the fact that everything is simulated negates any genuine tension or urgency because one never gets the impression that anything substantial is at stake at any given time in the story. The basic point seems to be that combat in between fighting is dull. Pity the movie itself proves to be pretty blah and dreary as well.

Mamoru Oshii's latest film is a supposedly linked to his film in the portmanteau film called Kill. It is also a second go round in the world of Avalon, which is the name of one of his other live action films. The earlier film deals with a woman who is paid to play in an online game set in a world called Avalon. The earlier film is a very good looking film but one that people either lover of hate.Assault Girls is a film that I think most people are going to hate. The film begins with a very dense very complicated narrated sequence that sets up everything and explains a new version of Avalon. Its a sequence that is so long and so rambling that I ended up checking how much time elapsed on the DVD, eight minutes and it was still going.Once Oshii gets all of the words out the way the film descends into the excesses of the earlier film which are these beautiful but almost silent sequences that seem to have been designed to look good but don't really work outside of that. Yea things like the giant worm gotcha bit that immediately follows the narration is nice but it takes too long to get to the punchline.Give the film points for looking good and very much like anime come to life, but strip away even more for technical gaffes like having all of the battlefield dialog spoken into masks which makes understanding what is ever is said near impossible. The fact that this Japanese film was made in English with actors who don't speak the language well enough doesn't help either.(yes they speak fine when unmasked, but with the masks its a almost unintelligible.) Worse is the pacing. Outside of the early worm hunts not a whole heck of a lot happens until the end. This is not real life reflected back at us, this is four characters walking across a blank landscape. Yea there is some action at the end but I'm guessing that most people who have the film play out to the end credits only had it do so because they fell asleep on the film and were woken up by the loud music that plays with the credits.Give the film 10 points for the look. Take away about twenty five for the boredom.

If you really want to watch this movie after reading all the reviews, I recommend renting rather than buying because I doubt that you would want to watch this movie twice. The CGI special effects were almost video game quality and minimal. Most of the time the characters are wandering around volcanic soil with no other discernible landmarks other than a small mountain in the background. There are too many slow moments when the camera would focus a close up on a snail, voice overs that sounded totally gibberish, and confusing plot lines. The characters were wooden with no developments and added little to the plot line. Worse, when the characters spoke, they often spoke broken English with bad accents under muzzle type face masks that made it very unintelligible (even to me, an Asian, that is used to bad English). I guess to some (0.01%) of the population they would say that this movie is arty or avante garde. But if you are looking for a fun movie full of hot girls with guns (as I expect you would by the title "Assault Girls") this ain't it.

Just saw this movie at the New York Anime Festival and it was a major disappointment, making me wish I didn't waste time waiting to see it when I could have gone home sooner. The first 15-20 minutes of the movie had a narrator describing the economic conditions leading up to this video game world. This should have and could have been done in less time. The few fight scenes that there were in this movie were very short. Some people walked out within the first 30 minutes of this movie and the remaining audience started giving this movie the MST 3000 treatment. I don't think anyone watching this movei liked it going by the audience responses. It takes more than trying to look artsy to make a movie, there has to be some plot and this movie really had none. Really I've seen porn movies with more plot than this stinker.