Sunday, November 10, 2019

Tokyo Species (2012) is a tad underwhelming.

Love the poster but the film feels very cheap, which I'm sure it was. The CGI especially is not good and the lead actress (AV star Maria Ozawa) gets almost no dialogue so you can't connect with her character much. Cronenberg was very smart with his writing on The Fly remake to be certain Seth Brundle didn't lose his speech until the very last transformation. Clearly, as you can gleam from the title of this Japanese movie, it's an obvious ripoff, erm I mean "clone," of the 1995 sci-fi flick Species. Regardless, I still kinda like it but it's a shame they didn't have more money and give Maria Ozawa more of a chance to actually act. I wish filmmakers would stop using bad CGI. It's a lot easier to forgive bad practical but bad CGI looks so lousy you are instantly thrown out of the movie. I always wonder about films like this. Were they trying to make something great or just something cheap to cash in? But I guess it could depend on who you ask: the producer or the director.