TrueJoshNight Truly Dreadful Film

VividSimon Simply Perfect

PodBill Just what I expected

ThedevilChoose When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

popcorninhell Being a fan of director/star Hitoshi Matsumoto's Symbol (2009) didn't truly prepare me for Big Man Japan. Watching any of his films is sure to give any casual viewer a case of cultural whiplash yet Big Man Japan is an entirely different beast. It's a film that in many ways is much more grounded in its themes, telling a very human tale of frustrated potential and quiet desperation. Yet visually Big Man Japan is so f***ing bizarre; uncomfortably mixing the monster destroys tiny models, Power Rangers (1993-1996) aesthetic, while using computer generated kaijus that can only be described as Giger- esque.Matsumoto plays Masaru Daisato, a lonely Japanese man in his early forties living in a decrepit house in Tokyo. Most days he stays at home avoiding the public, venturing out only when he's in the mood for his favorite super noodle shop. He has reason to be nonplussed, his ex- wife (Machida) has custody of his young daughter, the government gives him a measly pension to live on, and his agent (Ua) is finding increasingly contrived ways to get rich off of Masaru's good name. Oh yeah, I almost forgot, when the country is threatened by a city-sized kaiju, Masaru must run to the nearest power station, is electrocuted and is turned into Big Man Japan, Japan's twenty- stories tall protector. He's the latest in a long line of protectors and since the "glory days" of his grandfather(Yazaki), his presence is seen with a mix of ambivalence and hostility.Thematically, Big Man Japan acts as a counter-piece to the justifiably maligned Hancock (2008). The concept is pretty much the same but instead of a misanthropic Will Smith we get a quietly depressed giant and instead of an earnest against-type Jason Bateman we get Japanese popstar Ua constantly clacking away at her Nokia flip-phone. Yet here the overly complicated mythology sorta kind of works. Much of the history of the monsters are given via flashlight illuminated dossier which can be annoying, yet much of the inner logic of the film is left unexplained and inferred visually. This can either be seen as one of Big Man Japan's greatest assets or one of it's most jarring byproducts.Additionally other than the battle sequences between Big Man and the monsters, most of the story is told in a faux cinema verite style. This fly-on-the-wall objectivity let's Matsumoto to truly encapsulate the character in all his underplayed absurdity while giving most things emotional weight and resonance. Stories involving Masaru's overly ambitious father (Toriki) and his now senile grandfather fondly remembered as "The Fourth" prove especially disquieting.If only the battle sequences had the same effect. Despite being prominently featured in promotional materials, they almost appear to be lifted out of another movie entirely, functioning with different pacing and different instincts when it comes to humor. The modelling for downtown Tokyo and Nagoya prove chintzy and the monsters design make them resemble the Macarena baby put through Dr. Frankenstein experiments. Maybe with a bigger budget or a more efficient division of resources, these sequences could have been the nightmare-fuel Matsumoto intend them to be. As it stands, they're just kind of dull.Big Man Japan has all the makings of a cult film. Seeded with a very good high-concept, the flick is mindbogglingly bizarre, sporadically funny and a little more complex than most would give it credit for. Yet it's also repulsively alien in form and presentation guaranteeing that only the least discerning of American audiences will find something worth watching. Otherwise, apart from a hallucinogenic ending that channels the runaway ridiculousness of South Park (1997-Present), I'd just skip it and see something else.

mr-chirpsky No skill went into any aspect of this incredibly stupid excuse for a movie. There were no actors, assuming an actor is someone who actually acts.The dialog, as evidenced by the subtitles (which I eventually had to turn off), must have been a transcript of a fight between severely mentally retarded pituitary cases. Finally, the animation was utterly unbelievable. The one star I gave this movie was for the little bit of creativity spent thinking up these comic book rejects. Don't waste your time on trash of this sort.Confucius say, "Plenty of worthwhile movies you're time will be better spent watching."

MidnightTrash Hitoshi Matsumoto's wonderfully deadpan "Big Man Japan" ("Dai-Nihonjin) is a brilliantly hilarious send up of Japan's giant monster movies of yesteryear. A postmodernist at heart, Matsumoto flips the genre conventions, grounding the beautifully weird world of "Big Man Japan" in reality through a dry mocumentary style that mixes interviews, archival footage and computer animated fight scenes with a razor's wit.Masaru Daisato is the latest in a long legacy of men who grow to mammoth proportions when juiced with electricity. Masaru spends most of his time as a normal-sized human being, surviving on a meager government stipend in a grimy suburb of Tokyo. But when strange monsters attack (and believe me they are strange), Masaru is hooked up to a power plant and juiced with enough electricity to grow into a purple underweared giant.Not that any of this endears Masaru to the citizens of Japan. The road to the power plant is plastered with signs critical of Masaru's actions and abilities. His house is covered in threatening graffiti and vandalized on a daily basis. Masaru is an outsider in a country of insiders, a colorful anachronism in increasingly bland times.Perspective is a central theme in "Big Man Japan"'s giant monster weirdness. Does having the ability to turn into a giant and save the country from destructive building-stomping monsters make you a hero or a freak? It all depends on who you ask.There's no doubt that Masaru is a loser. When not attacking giant monsters with a large pipe, Masaru sits in his graffiti-covered home eating dehydrated seaweed ("It only grows big when you need it.") while neighbors throw bricks through his windows. Masaru's wife and daughter have left him, photos are all that remains of his profession's illustrious past and his show routinely earns less ratings than the weather report. No one ever said it was easy being big.And perhaps this is the biggest joke in Matsumoto's wonderfully awkward film. Godzilla eventually became a friend of the children, saving Japan from countless invading monsters, but he was always a foreigner. Godzilla called Monster Island home, not the gray slums of Tokyo. Ultraman was from outer space not Osaka. This is an important difference. Forced to live among the very people he fights to protect, Masaru became the biggest oddity in a hegemonic society based on Confucian values.The world of "Big Man Japan" is one of dashed hopes and squandered potential, a world where Masaru's senile grandfather, made so by repeated exposure to high levels of electricity, zaps himself giant and wanders through the city. And the monsters, as outrageously weird as they may be, never actually seem threatening in any way.Instead, the creatures, with their comb-overs, phallic eyes and sexual perversions seem as oblivious as children that their actions do any harm. Masaru dispatches the beasts by clubbing them once in the head, not through a long drawn out fight, and their souls ascend to heaven in a campy 8-bit video game fashion.And by the end, when Matsumoto drops the mocumentary cameras and the computer animation for a ridiculous symbolism-heavy homage to cheesy rubber suits and miniature sets fare like "Ultraman" it hardly makes sense but is hilarious nonetheless. I would've preferred "Big Man Japan" didn't end with an allegory about Japan-China relations and the reliance on the American military for protection filtered through campy 1970s kaiju sensibilities but what the hell, it was one crazy ride.Taken from http://www.midnighttrash.net/?p=677 MidnightTrash.net: Your guide to everything under the radar.

robert-leonetti The problem with this movie is simple. Bad editing. Loved the concept. Loved the monster fight scenes. Loved the smallness of the main character's regular life. But I hated the slow slow pace. Hated the amount of completely uninteresting nothingness between the interesting parts.No doubt the director and the editor talked a lot about creating a mood and setting up comedic pace. But geeez, we live in a Twitter world of 140 characters.Still, this is a movie that will get better with familiarity. One that, if you can sit through the first 3 or 4 watchings, will be hilarious to quote back and forth between friends. There are definitely good things here. :) What I would absolutely LOVE to see this film be re-edited down to maybe 80 or 90 minutes. It could be really tight. Please, someone, anyone, even an amateur, re-edit this movie. It would be a great student project - to save this movie from its own festering pacing.