Blood Type: Blue Film Review

Aka - Blue Christmas

Here is a Japanese film to add to your Christmas watch list. Carols, snow, gift buying and joy fill the air. Also, mass death. Maybe not one to watch with your children on Christmas Eve. It is a very peculiar film that disguises its true intent within the pretense of a sci-fi UFO story. The UFO's are never seen, just spoken of. They are in fact just a device to get the narrative going. It is a sprawling unstructured film that feels very unfocused and scattershot but eventually gets to the place it wants to be - a condemnation of our inhumanity towards those we see as different and how governments manipulate people to hate for their own purposes. It isn't subtle in any way. Early in the film one of the characters is watching a documentary of Hitler and the slaughter of the Jews. That is what plays out here. Ethnic cleansing. Perhaps the film would have had more of an emotional impact if it had stuck with some of the characters all the way through rather than jumping around but nevertheless the final few minutes are a punch to the stomach. It was produced by Toho and directed by Kihachi Okamoto, best known for his gangster and Samurai films.

UFOs have been spotted in the sky all around the world and yet they seem to be doing nothing but shining a bright light on certain people. Reporter Minami (Tatsuya Nakadai) hears a strange story from a friend. A new actress who is about to get a lead in a TV drama cut herself in the kitchen and he noticed the blood was blue. Minami mentions this to his boss and a few days later the actress is fired. The boss refuses to answer Minami if this is why. He lies to his friend that he didn't tell anyone. The story that he is following is about a missing professor (Eiji Okada) who is an expert on blood. The investigation leads Minami to New York City where in a bizarre segment of the film, he just goes up to random people on the street and asks them if they know the professor. Finally, though he does get in touch with him and the professor warns him that a global conspiracy is underway to do terrible things. This conversation moves all over the city from a restaurant to the docks to an art museum to a graveyard for no reason that I could figure out other than to spotlight New York City since they were there. But Minami is soon scared off the story by government officials and basically disappears from the film.

Reports are coming in from all over - first just a few individuals, then a trickle, then hundreds - of people who were exposed to the UFO rays and had their blood turn to blue. People begin to quietly disappear, and the media hushes it up. One of the government people involved in making people disappear is Oki (Hiroshi Katsuno). He is one of a force of agents tracking and arresting blue blood people and sending them to concentration camps. The government is telling them and soon society that the blue blood people are not humans, are dangerous, need to be stamped out. They are of course exactly like the rest of the population except for the color of their blood. But that is enough to scare people. All over the world. Then he discovers that the woman (Keiko Takeshita) he loves has blue blood. Christmas is coming. And so is death. The film runs over two hours and wanders up and down and around. A lot could have been tightened up. Certainly, an intriguing premise but it keeps its distance from the characters involved and their unexpressive performances keep the audience from being emotionally invested in them. It felt to me to be a bit ham-fisted, but the message still has relevancy today as we look around the world and at home.