Attack on Titan II: End of the World

Cannily released as Attack on Titan: The Movie Part 2 in some territories, Attack on Titan II: End of the World is the feature film as a supplementary episode. This instalment then essentially working as the third act of its predecessor. End is a short conclusion, chopped off then gussied up with exposition heavy reveals, a couple of betrayals, and far too many runtime-padding flashbacks. We are given access to this fallen world's secret history - projected on a wall for Haruma Miura's brain-fried Eren - that explicitly roots the Titan series in the grainy footage of 20th century experiment camps. The human body is positioned as pupal, the base component required for thoughtless, ravenous ogres. This rampaging threat then is biological, rather than mythological, a correction that seems crowbarred in to make sense of several characters with the newfound ability to spontaneously grow bone and blubbery mass around their screaming, human bodies.

This strangely accessible update to the film's rules, coupled with a repetitive structural model, hobbles End of the World, taking more and more time away from the magic of Part 1's hook: my gang goes giant whaling. This new, faction based drama completely muscles out the acute horror felt in the first film, that of a profound upset in the food chain that has sent humanity spiralling to the bottom. Shinji Higuchi's previous Attack on Titan was Jack and the Beanstalk taken to a post-apocalyptic extreme: teenagers armed with swords and axes attempting to bring down an army of greedy, sexless giants. End of the World is instead 80 minutes of melodramatic circling (that must be endured) on the way to some wonderfully constructed kaiju battles. The behemoths in Higuchi's sequel combine prosthetics, miniatures, pyrotechnics, and computer generated effects to portray a violent post-human lifecycle. Emaciated monsters, with rictus grins, come up against ginormous, volcanic Body Worlds exhibits as well as an ossified twin that briefly transforms End of the World into a belated sequel to The War of the Gargantuas. 

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.