Talk about a project for hire- this is one of those under-seen movies that is understandably kept nowhere in your local blockbuster, and only discovered on Netflix or Amazon by the fans of director Takashi Miike who might want to look for something even more 'different' than his high-voltage yakuza pictures and surreal nightmares. In a sense Andromedia is still a surreal nightmare, only this time filled with so much corny vibes that you'd have to be the biggest air-head 13 year old girl not to see the humor in it. I'm sure Miike had to see it too, otherwise he probably wouldn't of touched it with a 20 foot pole. It's the kind of work that's too weird to be popular, ever, in America, and I wonder looking at the response here on IMDb if there's even much awareness for it in Japan. It tells a love story with images like the cherry orchard (on a beach) meant to accentuate the power of the main teen couple (Mai and Yu played by typical but dippy Hiroko Shimabukuro and Kenji Harada respectfully). Mai, by the way, is not really Mai, but Ai, her previous self's memory packed into a computer simulation form of herself after her sudden death.
It's not just Yu who wants her, but there's also some nefarious villains who want her via the technology for no really big reasons (no world domination, at least I don't think so) other than just having it cause it's there. One of these guys is very strangely played by Christopher Doyle, a DP for directors like Van Sant and Wong Kar Wai, who happens to have a haircut like a muskrat long dead and made into a wig. He has his goons chase after Yu, and his friends as well, just after that laptop with poor Mai (err, Ai), leading up to a climax that doesn't really make much sense except to have really over-the-top CGI effects. Actually, much of the film doesn't make too much sense, but if you don't get that by the thirty minute marker, just throw out the movie. I didn't know going into it that it was also, in part, meant to be a partial commercial for two pop-music groups (though the very oddly placed and uproariously funny music video in the middle of the movie marks as something of a crazy marvel in Miike's cannon).
Of course, it will never mark as a must-see even for most Miike fans, and I'm sure some who come across it will just keep scratching their heads once it's over. Though after seeing several other films from the massively prolific director, I'm kind of glad to see that there is such a fluffy side to his savage satire, and how in-between the sickeningly cutesy love moments (like when Mai and Yu have a real 'connection', where a carnival lights up and the nearly wretched music cues up) there's still some bits that remind one of the heedlessly inventive and demented wild-man of Japanese cinema. The only thing funnier, sometimes unintentionally sometimes not, than seeing Yu and his boy-band friends jumping off the cliffs to relative safety, or the brain-tumored gangster Takanaka getting enveloped in the horrendous tubes of the internet center, or the *very* late 90s mix of Backstreet Boys-styled music and CGI, is that this was originally based on a book! It's poof, slight, and it almost marks a form of campy, sci-fi pop-art.
It's not just Yu who wants her, but there's also some nefarious villains who want her via the technology for no really big reasons (no world domination, at least I don't think so) other than just having it cause it's there. One of these guys is very strangely played by Christopher Doyle, a DP for directors like Van Sant and Wong Kar Wai, who happens to have a haircut like a muskrat long dead and made into a wig. He has his goons chase after Yu, and his friends as well, just after that laptop with poor Mai (err, Ai), leading up to a climax that doesn't really make much sense except to have really over-the-top CGI effects. Actually, much of the film doesn't make too much sense, but if you don't get that by the thirty minute marker, just throw out the movie. I didn't know going into it that it was also, in part, meant to be a partial commercial for two pop-music groups (though the very oddly placed and uproariously funny music video in the middle of the movie marks as something of a crazy marvel in Miike's cannon).
Of course, it will never mark as a must-see even for most Miike fans, and I'm sure some who come across it will just keep scratching their heads once it's over. Though after seeing several other films from the massively prolific director, I'm kind of glad to see that there is such a fluffy side to his savage satire, and how in-between the sickeningly cutesy love moments (like when Mai and Yu have a real 'connection', where a carnival lights up and the nearly wretched music cues up) there's still some bits that remind one of the heedlessly inventive and demented wild-man of Japanese cinema. The only thing funnier, sometimes unintentionally sometimes not, than seeing Yu and his boy-band friends jumping off the cliffs to relative safety, or the brain-tumored gangster Takanaka getting enveloped in the horrendous tubes of the internet center, or the *very* late 90s mix of Backstreet Boys-styled music and CGI, is that this was originally based on a book! It's poof, slight, and it almost marks a form of campy, sci-fi pop-art.
