Returner Film Review

Ok, so the director borrows liberally from The Terminator and E.T. with a smidgeon of The Matrix for the action scenes, but that doesn't mean it's not an entertaining film. It just means the director has good taste. A lot of people know who the director is now but Returner was only his second theatrical film. His first was Juvenile in which a kid helps save the world from aliens. So at least at the beginning Takashi Yamazaki was very much a genre filmmaker and has basically remained that up to his recent Godzilla Minus One (not yet seen). His previous films are all over the place from sci-fi with Space Battleship Yamamoto to horror - the Parasyte films to a couple Doraemon films, an animated Lupin film, fantasy with the Ghost Book and his wonderful affectionately nostalgic portrait of post-war Tokyo with his Always: Sunset on Third series of films. Those Always films would make me forgive him for any missteps afterwards.

This film is helped inordinately by its two main stars - Takeshi Kaneshiro who was going back and forth between Japanese and Hong Kong films and Anne Suzuki, who I adore from being Hana in Hana and Alice. But yes, The Terminator. When we catch up with life on earth some decades from now, the human race is fighting for its existence with its last holdout in Tibet under siege from the technically advanced aliens called the Daggras who live inside these mechanical robotic suits with a force field around them. Their only hope is to send someone back about 80 years into the past to when the Daggra first showed up and stop them. Only the teenage Milly is able to jump through the time machine warp in time. She lands on a ship where a gun battle is going on between a gang of sex trafficking Yakuzas and a man in a long black leather coat who is killing them with style and panache. This is Miyamoto.

In particular he wants to kill their Boss, Mizoguchi (Gorô Kishitani), a sadistic swine if ever there was one. Mizoguchi killed a childhood friend for organs years before and he has been after him ever since and gained some fine killing skills along the way. He is about to end his crusade with a bullet to his head when he hears someone behind him and turns and shoots. It's Milly. By the time he turns back, Mizoguchi is gone. He takes Milly back to his place to tend to her where she tells him this insane story - she is from the future and needs his help to kill the first alien who lands in two days. He doesn't believe her of course but a bomb she plants into his neck convinces him to go along with her fantasy.

When he later sees the spaceship and the alien, he goes "you are really from the future aren't you?". Mizoguchi and his gang are also after the alien and spaceship for profit. The twosome get close to the alien who tells them he just wants to go home. Get me home. So instead they have to save him, not kill him. Lots of Matrix like action as a device from the future allows Miyamoto to speed up enough to dodge bullets. A number of reviews complained about how dull the palette is that the film utilized - murky brown - since I was watching a video from YouTube, I thought it was just that and got used to it.