![]() Among his best known work is "Audition" and "Ichi the Killer", though he has also become notorious for his banned contribution to "Masters of Horror" and the outrageously over-the-top "Visitor Q". But what they find instead are giant, mutated, humanoid cockroaches! Director Takashi Miike is known for having worked in a wide range of genres, from crime to horror to musical and superhero films. Now, a manned ship to Mars has landed and the crew members are ready for their mission: to exterminate the roaches. They came up with a plan of sending cockroaches and moss to the surface so that the moss would absorb sunlight and the insects would serve as food for the moss. With the space program attempting to travel to Mars, scientists were tasked with warming up the planet so that humans could survive. Watch how the exterminators become the exterminated, as these hand-picked criminals dressed to impress in their space suits are facing something much more than your standard cockroach like first thought as now they've evolved into humanoid killing machines intent of slaughtering humans. Really the plot plays secondary to the on-screen action set-piece after set-piece of cartoon-like CG activity. And most of the cast are killed before reaching the hour mark! From then onwards it only gets weirder and absurd in its denouncements, while giving a little exposition to remaining characters. They're thrown together in such a careless, rushed manner that when the deaths pile up there's little emotional impact. Characters and their story arches have no real clarity. And I mean a lot of squishing! So it can get messy watching beefed-up humanoid cockroaches, humans and hybrid human-insects with their limbs tenaciously torn off, heads being snapped back and insides seeping out, but this messiness also included the minor storytelling. A run-of-the-mill beginning (the dirty dozen in a futuristic set-up on a mission to the planet Mars) succumbs to a smorgasbord of heavy CG, bug morphing accompanied by a informative lesson on the insects the character become, hammy dialogues, ridiculously crazy fight sequences and volatile bug squishing. "Terra Formars" is downright nonsensical sci-fi pulp. So in a way I wasn't too sure what was lifted from the source material compared to what was Miike doing his signature madcap craziness. Reading the outline for this film, it seemed like Miike could have fun. Sometimes you are picking up your jaw from off the ground, while other times you're left scratching your head and then possibly awe-struck because you're seeing something rather normal. Each tonally different to the point you don't know what to expect. The varied career of Miike, churning out films like no other. I knew nothing of the manga series, but Takashi Miike's involvement - I thought I'll give it a shot and see what he would bring to the fold. Sitting on the couch "Terra Formars" just happened to be playing on my TV screen.
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