Avalon (Rental)

It’s not too often an animé director skips across genres and decides to direct a live-action feature. Here Mamoru Oshii, acclaimed director of the brilliant animé Ghost in the Shell, tries his hand at live direction with mixed results.

Avalon is the name given to the mythical island where the souls of heroes go after death – most well known for the final passage of King Arthur during the Dark Ages. Here it is a game played by a majority of people in the world; a world of the near future which is torn by war. Ash is among the best of players and works solo, although she used to ride with the greatest of all groups or ‘parties’, the Wizards. Parties are actually illegal in the game and as Ash progresses up the levels of the game, she discovers that her old team wasn’t disbanded by outward reasons but by the Game itself.

"Reality is nothing but an obsession that takes us…"

In investigating she encounters old teammates who help her with the facts she needs to get to the objective of Avalon; the end of the Game and beating the Ghost, a rogue program of a little girl who destroys all she fights. These defeated are known as Unreturned and are burnt out husks lying comatose in various hospitals around the city, their minds destroyed by the program. Ash’s task then is to beat the girl and reach the Class: Real level as the final objective and return unscathed.

Being made by a director with extreme production methods as Oshii has, the look of the film is very sharp, impressive and of the minute. It goes into a depth beyond today’s more conventional games, however, and does look immersive with its various modern references. Films like The Matrix, Alien and even 1984 all get a look in in this 2000 film shot almost entirely in Poland. This is one of the biggest surprises here in being a Japanese film that's spoken in Polish, however the countryside and sets used do seem to fit the piece extraordinarily well.

Attention to detail is brilliant with an awesome series of locales and costumes. These costumes are a credit to Magdalena Teslawska, who mixes old world streetwear with other mixed chronologies to create the surreal atmosphere so necessary for the story. Much of the film’s special effects ring with a video game flavour, which both helps disguise any shoddier efforts and maintains the theme throughout. However, the effects are quite extraordinary and feature some nice sequences I’ve not seen attempted elsewhere. The majority of the film is shot under filters that again can be used to disguise the illusions, but works effectively in creating the alternate reality or surreality necessary to the game environment. It works so well, in fact, that when the film switches to regular colour and photography for the last 25 minutes or so, we are thrown into confusion as to which is the true reality of the film. It’s a clever ruse and one that does create an extra twang of mystery for the final outcome.

Oshii’s film, while perhaps not to everyone’s tastes, is certainly an interesting take on the evolution of the video game and has been created very cleverly. It isn’t quite as defining a work as Ghost in the Shell, but is still well worth the investigation for fans of role playing games (read: nerds) or anyone after a science Ffction film of different measure.

As noted, much of this film is shot under sepia or green filters that severely limit the colour palette. It has a diffuse glow about much of the white balance parts of a given scene which works nicely to set up the gritty used future of the world at war. However, this also brings with it a grainy, washed out feeling that is no doubt intentional, but may be off-putting for some. There are occasional static artefacts that just contribute to the feeling of the film and aren’t disruptive, while shadow detail is intentionally murky. Blacks are thick with no real definition either, but are true. The picture quality during the last 25 minutes is exquisitely clean and well saturated, which tells me that everything that has gone before is quite deliberate, so there can be no real complaint other than the image may not be worth it for everyone. It’s quite clear for the most part, just saturated in these filters.

The overall transfer has been delivered in 1.85:1 with anamorphic enhancement for people playing on their widescreen TVs.

A choice of Dolby Digital 5.1 surround or 2.0 is all on offer, and I went with the 5.1 although flicking back and forth between occasionally told me that the stereo mix is entirely adequate. The surrounds, however, come alive throughout with various video game sound effects and constant noisy roaming. The subwoofer, too, gets dirty with plenty of support for explosions and gunfire and helicopters crashing and tanks rolling and labours in a pretty constant work mode.

Dialogue is all in Polish with the subtitles supporting well enough, though being able to speak Polish would definitely be an advantage here (an advantage I don’t possess, unfortunately). Kenji Kawai has created an incredible score for the whole film that is all at once ghostly, choral, progressive, classical, heroic, operatic and epic. Utilising the full Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra (who even perform live for a time) his score is a definite plus here and truly helps create the overt dramatic energy required for the storyline. Kawai’s last score I reviewed was in Princess Blade and this one broadly outshines that without question. That suffered an animé-style sentimentality that is refreshingly missing here.

Some awesome extras here add volumes to the weight of the DVD’s value, with the first extra being Beyond Avalon, an 11:46 Japanese making of featurette. The style of the Japanese 'making of' is so very different from the western ones it’s worth watching just for the different delivery alone. It also features plenty of director interviews and casting info and a brief dissection of pre-production, production and post-production. Concise and jam-packed with content.

The trailer drops in next for 1:45 in unenhanced 1.85:1 and 5.1 surround.

The first of two corker additions is in the director interview that runs for 21:18 in which Oshii speaks in subtitled Japanese about his entire life, his influences, American cinema, his father and a personal history of the experience of making the film. Curiously, the questions here are in French (subtitled) titles which is just getting plain confusing. However, this is a decent listen (or read, I suppose) and worth the look.

The next is the doozie though. This is a lengthy featurette on the Special Effects of Avalon. Running a huge 57:51 we are walked through practically every decent effect used in the film (the vast majority). Nobuaki Koga speaks humbly about the breakdown for each effect and is occasionally congratulated by another voiceover, which is quite funny actually. This is a fascinating feature and a pretty thorough dissection of effects if you’re into that sort of thing. Thankfully we are spared the usual wire-frame boredom as well and get to see all the cool explosions and junk they did to map into the film. Neat. The definite extras winner.

Then we get the usual bunch of trailers in which we get the Eastern Eye Montage as well. This features brief bits from Bichunmoo, The Eye, Avalon, Bangkok Dangerous, Seven Samurai, Infernal Affairs and Princess Blade. This gets followed by a couple more in Ghost in the Shell and Infernal Affairs. Lastly is a strange trailer for Yojimbo which is one sequence of severe carnage taken from this classic movie, plus 15 seconds or so of the title, Yojimbo. Still cool.

Definitely one for the role playing freaks, this is a clever storyline enmeshed in a virtual reality world in which nothing is as it seems… or is it? That’s the whole thing, we can’t ever really tell in which reality the characters are and that is part of the point of the film. Performances are happily devoid of the usual blatant sexuality of an animé film, although this closely resembles one allover.

I can definitely recommend this for anyone after a bunch of cool special effects with a storyline a little more complicated than your usual action movie. Visually it’s sometimes difficult to focus on, but for those who hang in there, the rewards are justified.

Game on!