A solid entry in the 20th Century Boys trilogy
What They Say:
It is now 2015, and Friend rules a disturbing new world. Kenji has been missing since Bloody New Year’s Eve of 2000, and his niece Kanna is now in high school. Her history textbook contains a fabricated story about Kenji and his friends being the terrorists behind the horrific events of 2000. Kanna, knowing the truth, openly resents this, and as a result she is sent to Friend Land, a facility where people with rebellious anti-Friend behavior are re-educated.The surviving secret base members have spent the last 15 years in various activities opposing Friend and his regime, trying to find out the truth about Friend. Soon they discover the shocking existence of The New Book of Prophecy, the sequel to The Book of Prophecy, describing an event: In 2015, at a church in Shinjuku, a savior will rise to uphold justice but will be assassinated. Who is the savior? Once again, Doomsday looms near…
The Review:
Audio:
Two Japanese language tracks are available. Dolby Digital 2.0 audio is encoded at 48 kHz at 224 Kbps, and Dolby Digital 5.1 encoded at 48kHz at 448 Kbps. Both tracks offer good separation. The sound stage for the 5.1 track seemed to be more nuanced, but to my ears, it was not as natural as the 2.0 track that I chose for my viewing. The audio ranges from quiet conversations to swells of background music and sound effects. While the mix may not have been as balanced as a major Hollywood release, it never falters and offers a consistent audio experience.
Video:
As originally released in 1.78:1, the video is encoded for anamorphic playback. Playback is variable bitrate. While I viewed the disc without being bothered by artifacts or noise, the video does have considerable noise mostly visible in the darker scenes. Even with a fairly high bitrate, there tended to be moments where a closer than normal viewing made artifacts very noticeable. From a proper viewing distance, the colors seemed natural and saturated in close-ups. Overall, the encoding seems relatively good for a DVD of a show with large amounts of quickly changing visual information.
Packaging:
The disc comes in a standard keepcase sized Eco-Box that has large open sections of the front and back covers. While less plastic is good for the environment, the insert and clear plastic sleeve show signs of stress. The cover has an image of what appears to be almost all of the characters who have a line in the movie. The back cover offers headshots of four of the main characters and four small scenes from the film at the bottom. The text is small and not easy to read, especially the credits and copyright information that are printed in a very small gray font on a mostly black background. The disc has been printed with an image of Expo 2015.
Menu:
The menu screen is dynamic and offers an overlay of character images that creates an interesting sense of visual depth. All active links are lined up horizontally. The scene menu offers several screens of links. With the length and complexity of the movie, the large number of selectable scenes is welcome.
Extras:
The only extras are Japanese and U.S. trailers for the 20th Century Boys series and other Viz Pictures trailers.
20th Century Boys is based on the manga series by Naoki Urasawa, and the story has been broken up over three discs. Writing about part 2 requires talking a little about part 1. Even though each part is the extension of a single narrative arc, each part seems to target a different audience. Disc 1 tells the story of a group of friends who played together as children, and as adults they have been presented a mystery where a religious cult seems to have stolen the story and symbol they created as part of their club. Kenji, the central character of both the childhood and adult group, wrote the story but he cannot remember the details. As an adult, he is a slacker working in his family’s convenience store and taking care of his infant niece. After Kenji does a little exploration, the cult comes for the baby because she is the daughter of the cult leader, Friend. When the terroristic events that Kenji wrote about as a child start to come true in cities around the world, he gathers up his old friends and try to stop Friend. Part 1 contained drama, action, and sci-fi elements. I feel that it targets an older male and female audience who would find resonance with the idea of a class reunion and trying to reconnect with their distant pasts. Part 1 goes back and forth between the late 1960s, the late 1990s, and 2000.
Part 2 begins in 2015. The central character of this part is Kanna, Kenji’s teenage niece. Viewers follow her as she begins to question the mystery after Friend has become the leader of Japan and her uncle Kenji has been blamed for the terrorism at the turn of the millennium. We have fully moved from drama to a sci-fi mixed with action formula. Most of the plot feels like a young adult novel because a defiant Kanna is taken from school and sent to a reeducation facility. Many of the earlier sequences have the type of broad acting and silly humor common to Japanese splatter films of the time, but violence seems mostly contained to a few important sequences. Choreography and synchronous dialog creates a highly staged world. This reflects the creation of a world from a child’s story, and it gives us the step away from logic required to suspend disbelief enough to tolerate the hooded friend as a popular leader. Watching the Kanna sequences felt like watching a completely different movie from the first, and I feel the target audience for this entry is young people to twenty-somethings. There is still a thread with an older character, Kenji’s friend Otcho, as he escapes from prison and begins to pick up the pieces of the mystery.
Part 2’s main narrative threads don’t really advance the plot very far. Kanna’s trip to Friend Land leads to her being hooked into a virtual reality world of 1969. In a repeat of the scene from part 1 where Donkey gets frightened and jumps out a school window, Kanna enters the science lab and sees a masked boy hanging from the ceiling. The core mystery of who Friend might be gets tied to this recurring sequence, and we learn Kenji who stayed home that night has a connection to the event. After leaving Friend Land, Kanna and her classmate end up at a recreation of Friend’s childhood home. Filled with models and books, the home presents Friend as having had otaku tendencies. Even as the clues pile up, the mystery of who Friend might be remains hidden.
The final threads in this storyline return to the main narrative. As mentioned in Viz’s summary, a The New Book of Prophecy shows that another savior will rise and be assassinated. Kanna, Otcho, Friend, and others intersect at the Shinjuku church. With a nod to the Kennedy assassination, Friend arrives in a convertible waving to the crowd. Several sequences from earlier in the movie come into play. A few of them are so small, viewers may have forgotten about the characters until they show up for what appears to be the climax. This is not the end of the film, and it may not even be the climax. I don’t want to spoil any twists for the viewers who may enjoy watching the mystery unravel, but I will say the events that take place set up the next plot point that will allow Part 3 to make sense.
In Summary:
One could argue this film stands on its own as a sci-fi thriller set in a culture as it blooms in dystopia. As the second entry in a three-part series, this movie adds to the mythos created in the first while it builds on the mystery left unresolved. Much of this segment seems targeted at younger viewers, but Gen X and Boomer fans should be able to engage with much of the story where the older friends from part 1 act as protectors to younger characters. We lose most of the dramatic elements from the first installment and move more solidly into a sci-fi world painted with thoughtful and mostly unobtrusive CGI. Plotted more like a young adult novel than an action film, the large cast of characters develop enough that few scenes seem superfluous.
While I would recommend watching in sequence with Part 1 and Part 3, the movie can stand on its own with a little research to give it context. Without the context created in the first part, the movie will lose much of the heart that drives the story.
Features:
Japanese 2.0 and 5.1 language with removable subtitles
Content Grade: B+
Audio Grade: A-
Video Grade: A
Packaging Grade: B+
Menu Grade: A-
Extras Grade: C
Released By: Viz Pictures
Release Date: February 16th, 2010
MSRP: $24.92
Running Time: 140 Minutes
Video Encoding: 480i/p MPEG-2
Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1 Anamorphic Widescreen
Review Equipment:
Samsung KU6300 50” 4K UHD TV, Sony BDP-S3500 Blu-ray player connected via HDMI, Onkyo TX-SR444 Receiver with NHT SuperOne front channels and NHT SuperZero 2.1 rear channel speakers.
