Movie Review: 20th Century Boys 1: Beginning of the End (2008) directed by Yukihiko Tsutsumi
When Kenji Endo (Toshiaka Karisawa) was a teenager, he loved rock music, especially “20th Century Boy” by T. Rex. He thought rock, and in particular his own music, could change the world. But some twenty years on in the late 1990s, his life is nothing like he’d imagined. The band he was in never got traction, he had to start helping out in the family liquor store (now a chain convenience store) and his sister disappeared, leaving him to raise his niece Kanna. He’s feeling like a failure and wondering if this is all his life will ever be. But when he attends his elementary school reunion, Kenji learns that odd things are happening, including the death of old friend Donkey (Katsuhisa Namase), that may tie into an even earlier time in his life, when he and his buddies created an elaborate game of good vs. evil.
It seems there is a cult run by the mysterious Friend which is growing in power. It’s behind several disappearances at the very least, and may be responsible for a new virus that’s causing deaths in Africa, San Francisco and London. The pattern of attacks is uncannily similar to “The Book of Prophecies” Kenji wrote as a child, about an evil organization preparing to take over/destroy the world on the last day of the 20th Century.
Kenji must bring together his friends from the old days, including chubby Maruo (Hidehiko Ishizuka), cool Otcho (Etsushi Toyokawa) and tomboyish Yukiji (Takako Tokiwa). But they’re all just relatively normal people, can they possibly defeat a global doomsday conspiracy?
This is the first of three movies based on the 20th Century Boys manga by Naoki Urasawa, which ran from 1999 to 2006. It’s an epic plotline filled with twists and turns, and the trilogy movies were the most expensive ever made in Japan to that date.
Good: The plot is epic, and features some twists that are frankly amazing. The characters are interesting, though it’s going to take a while for you to figure out who’s who because there are a boatload of them, some of whom won’t have their full importance revealed until much later on. A particularly interesting one is Cho-san (Raita Ryu), a police detective who figures out Friend’s true identity way before anyone else. He’s only in one scene, but his legacy will be vital in the second and third films. The casting is also spot-on with many of the actors being very recognizable as the manga characters.
The music is decent, though there’s one deliberately mediocre song with punny lyrics that Kenji derides as “not rock.”
Fun bit: The Japanese word the Friend’s cult uses when they murder people, which is interpreted as “rejection” in English, is also children’s slang for “we aren’t friends anymore.”
There’s an odd blend of realism and fantasy: A couple of science fiction technologies turn out to be much less awesome than you’d expect due to real world physics, but people with genuine psychic powers exist.
Less good: While the main plotline remains intact, a lot of scenes had to be trimmed out. Combined with constant flashbacks to different time periods and a few flash-forwards, the plot can get very confusing to those who either don’t pay rapt attention (and it’s a long movie at over two hours) or haven’t read the manga. Also, this is very much part one of a trilogy and some viewers may not like where it leaves off, or having to commit to two more movies to find out what happens.
Content note: Bullying in the childhood flashbacks (it’s a characterization point that the grownup bullies remember events very differently from their former victims). The virus causes people to expel blood from their body, and the special effects don’t skimp on the gore. A couple of quick male-oriented fanservice moments. (A picture in a dirty magazine turns out to be plot-relevant.)
I don’t know that this movie ever had an official American release, so it may be difficult to track down, but if you liked the manga, this has a lot of the manga in it. Or if you are a fan of epic movie trilogies and don’t mind that it might be a little incomprehensible in places.
