Assault Girls Blu-ray

Assault Girls

 (2009)

Assault Girls Blu-ray offers solid video and great audio, but overall it's a mediocre Blu-ray release
Ghost in the Shell director Oshii Mamoru takes on live-action for the first time in eight years with the sci-fi action film Assault Girls. A continuation of his shorts in the omnibus films Kill and Shin Onna Tachiguishi Retsuden, Assault Girls stars hot young actresses Kikuchi Rinko (Babel), Saeki Hinako (Trick), and Kuroki Meisa (Crows Zero) as three butt-kicking warriors in a post-apocalyptic future. Fans of the director will immediately recognize his traits: deliberate pacing, cerebral storytelling, and a haunting score by Kawai Kenji. Similar to Miike Takashi's Sukiyaki Western Django, Oshii decided to shoot most of Assault Girls in English - a major challenge to his stars (and possibly to his viewers).

For more about Assault Girls and the Assault Girls Blu-ray release, see the Assault Girls Blu-ray Review

Starring: Rinko Kikuchi, Yoshikazu Fujiki, Meisa Kuroki, Hinako Saeki
Director: Mamoru Oshii

Assault Girls Blu-ray Review

Lost in translation.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, April 13, 2011

Anyone who has ever seen any of Mamoru Oshii's films knows one thing for certain: this is a writer-director who thinks. Now that thinking may never find artful expression in Oshii's actual writing, where he attempts to deliver unusually philosophy-laced screenplays in sometimes incredibly verbose scenarios where characters talk, talk, talk and yet seem really to be saying little that makes any sense. And so in one way Assault Girls is a welcome respite, as it contains virtually no dialogue whatsoever, at least after a mind-numbing and completely incoherent narrated prologue which lasts fully one tenth the rather truncated length of this film (a mere 70 minutes more or less in total). What this narrator is talking about is anyone's guess, and even the basic plot points the narration divulges are vomited out with such labyrinthine grammar and weird combinations of adjectives and nouns that one has to wonder after a while if things simply got lost in translation. Even four brief interstitial "chapter" headings, which mark supposed breaking points in the film, offer even more bizarre musings on the nature of God and, believe it or not, Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games. Yes, you did read that right: I attempted to keep the sentence fairly straightforward and declarative, but if you're still scratching your head, that's probably nothing compared to how you feel once you actually settle down to watch Assault Girls, Oshii's first foray into live action, and a linked piece to his previous Avalon, after a long hiatus spent making his acclaimed animes like Ghost in the Shell.



Fans of Ghost in the Shell know that Oshii is fascinated with questions of the human soul and spirit, and with the interconnectedness of the physical and metaphysical realms. Perhaps luckily, there's little to none of that element in Assault Girls. Instead we're thrust (after the interminable "introductory" prologue) into a post-Apocalyptic world where a Virtual Reality game called Avalon F is the refuge of four disparate characters, three women and one man. Why this game has taken over the world may or may not be addressed in that narrative prelude; the language was frankly too dense for this critic to ferret out anything beyond the mere basics of the plot setup. Oshii seems to be saying something about the questing human spirit, now thrust into an alien virtual desert landscape which is dominated by giant underground mutant worms that look like they've wandered over from a double feature of Dune and Tremors.

There is virtually no plot to speak of in Assault Girls. We have three gorgeous babes wandering around shooting the big sand whales, as well as a decrepit guy stumbling through the desert. The online voice keeps telling these four they'd do better to work together. That's it, plot wise. Instead, we get strange moments like the woman named Lucifer (Rinko Kikuchi) morphing into a bird. When she's in her human form, she resembles a dancer from a Bob Fosse film, replete with black bowler hat and leather halter top and hot pants. The two other women, Colonel (Hinako Saeki) and Gray (Meisa Kuroki), are more "traditional", at least with regard to apparel. In fact one of the few splashes of color throughout this oddly desaturated film is the Colonel's bright red-orange dress, which flares invitingly against the dusky pale backgrounds.

The lone male character is Jäger (Yoshikatsu Fujiki), a sort of Mad Max or Book of Eli post-nuclear traveler who wanders around the virtual desert with two pots clanging on his back like the gong of some unseen timepiece. Somehow Jäger has "leveled up" to the point where he has the most formidable weapon of the quartet, and the women come to him and propose a partnership in order to slay the biggest sand whale of them all. And then just when it looks like a huge battle will finally rescue this film from the doldrums, the film ends in a series of freeze frames. Fascinating, eh?

What was Oshii's intention in this film? There is so little here that it's almost mind boggling. From a visual standpoint, there's none of the innovation and panache that has literally colored scores of previous works. From a dramatic standpoint, the best that can be said about Assault Girls is that it is largely inert, even in the attack sequences. Oshii keeps utilizing the visual glyph of a snail as if to rub in our faces just how slow this film is. By comparison, the snail moves at a jet's pace, perhaps Oshii's ironic commentary on it all.

This is not to say the film is completely worthless. The interminable prologue does have some arresting imagery, and the first shot of the Stonehenge like assortment of vertical stones underneath the floating globe is very interesting. The floating globe, evidently the virtual reality's Master Control Program, to borrow something from another recent VR film, looks like the child of the big squishy ball from The Prisoner and one of those "newfangled" Uniball typing elements that were all the rage on IBM Selectric typewriters back in the 1970s.

This is a film that wants us to believe there are hidden strata that make it all incredibly meaningful, but only a metaphysical miner of the most determined sort is going to be able to ferret much of anything out of Assault Girls. The film ambles along with a couple of fun shooting segments, one passing laugh when Jäger repeatedly gets killed (virtually, of course) in a duel toward the end of the film, but otherwise this is one of the most Zen experiences ever in film, and definitely not in a good way. American poet Wallace Stevens, in his iconic poem "The Snow Man," urged people experiencing the foreign landscape of a frosty environment to "(behold)/Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is." Viewers of Assault Girls may well spend the entire 70 minute running time of the film attempting to behold something, anything, that rises above the very definite "nothing that is" at the heart of this completely peculiar Oshii offering.

Assault Girls Blu-ray, Video Quality

 

Anyone expecting the visual mastery Oshii has shown repeatedly in earlier works is going to be sorely disappointed by Assault Girls' AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. Is this the fault of the Blu-ray? Probably not. Oshii has shot this film on HD video, probably for budgetary reasons, and so we get that smooth textureless appearance that lacks depth and seems to place everything squarely in a two dimensional, shiny flat environment. There is next to no color in this film, obviously by design. Therefore, when we do get brief flashes of outrageous color, like the red-orange dress or the similarly colored snail shell, it seems like a visual breath of fresh air, to mix metaphors. The image is overly soft most of the time and the CGI elements are extremely basic. The overall pallor that this film offers is too uniform to ever generate even "stylistic" interest.

Assault Girls Blu-ray, Audio Quality

 

Though you'll see the audio specs describe the soundtrack as being Japanese, both the DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 and the Dolby Digital 2.0 tracks are mostly in English. Oshii gets around this seeming discrepancy by having one of the frankly completely arbitrary "rules" of the virtual game be that "native" languages (in this case Japanese) can't be spoken during the game. That means we get all of the major characters, obviously native Japanese speakers, sputtering semi-English for the bulk of the film. There is one brief sequence in Japanese toward the end of the film. Be that as it may, the lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track is certainly going to be loved by any of you who favor LFE. This is one of the most relentlessly "thumpy" soundtracks in recent memory, with aggressive low frequencies emanating from the subwoofer for virtually the entire film, by virtue of either Kenjii Kawai's pulsating score, or any number of roars from the sand whales or shots from various weapons to bring them down. The sound effects are fairly impressively splayed over the surround channels, but dialogue is almost always squarely front and center. This isn't an overly expressive Kawai score, relegated mostly to heavy bass work that may tend to annoy some listeners after a while. Fidelity is very good to excellent, with a definitely robust low end that will set the floorboards vibrating.

Assault Girls Blu-ray, Special Features and Extras

 

There's nothing here that I count as a "real" supplement, simply the Theatrical Trailer and some promos for other Well Go USA films and home video products.

Assault Girls Blu-ray, Overall Score and Recommendation

 

Despite the sometimes pretentious aspect to many of Oshii's films, I've always been a big fan, and I personally love Ghost in the Shell. I didn't know quite what to expect going into Assault Girls, so I don't think anyone could accuse me of having false preconceptions. I also can't imagine most Oshii fans not being radically disappointed with this effort. There's simply nothing here on virtually every level: no visual splendor, no real storyline, no drama, and really when you get right down to it, not even very much action. Maybe some people will find this a convenient sleep aid, but otherwise stick with some of Oshii's more impressive outings.

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