Attack on Titan

Shinji Higuchi's Attack on Titan is two superb special effects sequences moored at either end of a film that proposes hormonal drama but provides flat, disconnected, peril instead. None of Titan's human characters are particularly engaging - Haruma Miura's Eren does, eventually, manifest a power that transforms his body into towering musculature but this reveal is buried deep in the film's climax, its dissection postponed for the time being. Similarly, Ayame Misaki's Hiana - a single mother who must work a series of suicide missions to provide food for her child - seems to be offering a view into the socio-political structures that underline this besieged, strangely Germanic, apocalypse. Unfortunately any such insight is thwarted by Hiana's curtailed screen time; the woman chewed up not long after attempting to initiate sex with the film's virginal hero. 

Titan's flavourless cast does actually work for the film though, in a roundabout way. Filling the screen with thinly defined youths speaks to an attempt to generate YA money. In this live action context a teen ensemble immediately suggest a Harry Potter style franchise maker, doubly so when every adult is portrayed as either broken or mercurial. So it's a shock when these characters - the Seamus Finnigans or the Parvati Patils - start getting absolutely pulverised by massive, rampaging, dolts. These Titans, courtesy of special effects director Katsuro Onoue and (Tokyo Gore Police director) Yoshihiro Nishimura, are fantastically executed - lightly dressed suit actors inching through ruins in search of adolescent snacks. They are the human body rendered as enormous and overwhelming, figures that register as acutely repulsive because of, not just their manic disposition, but their sheer size as well. In contrast to the uniformly trim teenagers, these monsters are bloated and deformed too. Their stomachs sag and distend; their faces warped in ways that recall foetal alcohol syndrome. Menace in Attack on Titan is this wave of massive imperfection, the inflated character actors, ravenously chomping their way through a team of matinee idols.