The Japanese scifi comedy ASSASSINATION CLASSROOM is built
around a pretty madcap premise: A seemingly hostile and seemingly omnipotent
alien threatening to destroy Earth has struck up a backroom deal with heads of
Japanese defense forces to allow it to teach a class of struggling students how
to destroy it for the 3 months leading up to the decimation date. It’s a
confusing situation to be sure: Success would mean ending the imminent threat
to humanity posed by the bewildering life form, but it would also mean the
demise of the mostly friendly visitor who comes to grow on the students he
teaches.
This takes place in a version of the future in which a
ruling class maintains its dominant status and comfort by maintaining a large population
of less competent or confident types to do the distracting and undesirable
grunt work that will allow this parasitic relationship to continue. At least,
that was described in a blur of narration at the very beginning of the movie.
References to this dire situation are few and far between later on. The
students who would be chosen to work with UT, a nickname they don on their intergalactic
instructor referencing that most famous space visitor from 80s movie lore, are
meant to be among those destined for a dimmer future. And they are painfully
aware of it, concluding that their class section 3E refers to the ‘end of the
line’ and no going forward for them.
Under the guise of UT’s mischievousness, there would seem to
be an altruistic agenda, making the jolly looking extraterrestrial an unlikely kindred
spirit to James Edward Olmos’ protagonist in Stand And Deliver for the current
and likely future of manga and anime consuming set. This sounds like heady
stuff, especially with the added allusions to an ultra classist dystopian
future. Unfortunately, these bigger themes become virtually lost in the shuffle
due to this movie’s mode of delivery.
ASSASSINATION CLASSROOM falls squarely within a growing
phenomena of live action movie adaptations based on manga and anime. Where
those two formats lend themselves to episodic storytelling, a feature length movie
could and in this case does suffer from too many of these elements being
shoehorned in. Here the zany situations that occur one after the next can feel
like a jumble of ideas that were poured out of a bag, strewn out, and clumsily strung
together with only a slight regard for character or story or thematic
development. While not a reader nor viewer of the series (an admission I
realize casts all sorts of doubt on my assessment) I felt like I could see
individual chapters of a series being pasted into the big picture: There’s the
time the heartless android student is sent to the class to kill UT and is then rendered into a cooperative, communicative member of the class. There’s the time the short permanently
scowling boy wielding deadly tentacle-like hair, who is somehow related to UT, is sent to kill the alien teacher and then not so successfully
rendered into a member of the class. And so on. In effect, it feels like so many ideas raining
down from the sky with no rhyme or reason. Fun when digesting one at a time in
single servings, but trying to keep track of them across a two hour viewing experience
not so much. And while doing so, those bigger ideas hinted at in the movie’s
opening don’t make much of an impact.
Another difficulty I had connecting with the bigger pictures
is a lack of concern for characters, who seem as 2 dimensional as the pages
they were originally brought to life in. I know for instance that Nagisa is introverted and insecure and that his
time spent with UT brings out a stronger, bolder persona inside. And I want to
feel something as his story unfolds, but it is very difficult to do so because
of how superficially he is rendered. The same can be said of his classmates,
not to mention the obligatory bad guy who is just plain bad because well…he’s
just a really bad guy. And then there is the curious case of UT himself (I would
say itself but his voice and predilections pretty pointedly suggest a male
identity).
An amorphous smiley-faced creature with tentacles for arms,
he may in fact be the perfect buddy for a generation growing up with apps and
video game characters numbering significantly among their friends. He is the
exact bright yellow of the most popular emoticon that has insinuated itself
into mobile-to-mobile communications. And his countenance never changes. He is
virtually un-offendable and untiring: In effect the perfect 24-hour, all access
plaything. Perhaps I look at him, somewhat skeptically, as the perfect vehicle
for ironic detachment as he laughs off the attempts of his students to
assassinate him with a uniform chuckle (reminiscent of The Simpsons' Doctor Hibert)
and explains how his self defense systems came to his aid. At first these mixes
of a little bit of science and high percentages of cockamamie bullshit are
amusing, but soon grow tiresome. Perhaps it’s problematic for me that this
central character, charged with nurturing his wounded students’ development, is
incapable by design of showing any change of mood himself. There are some
attempts to show the measure of UT’s earnestness and ingenuity, like when he
flies a student struggling in English overseas for some firsthand experience,
But it is more a matter of understanding the movie’s intention, and not feeling
much of anything.
This again, may not be a problem for certain viewers,
particularly those who are younger and perhaps spend greater amounts of time
with and put more stock in virtual entities. It may also be indicative that
this is a product for consumers of rampant amounts of anime and manga, who
carry a completely different set of concerns than the ones I had. A perusal of
the comments for a posting of the movie’s trailer on Youtube (hey I do my
research) show a lot of furor over the similarity characters to have to their
manga and anime counterparts, the apparent gender of characters for whom there
had been ambiguity, and the J-pop and K-pop groups which stars of the movie are
members of. These arguably more superficial questions do feel as though they
are the movie’s prime concerns. And it can be distracting. Taking in the
coiffed hair and stylish threads of the students in Class 3E can make it
difficult to remember this is supposed to be the ragtag group of misfits who we
are meant to rally behind.
While the constant barrage of 'logic dropped from the sky' storytelling wore on this increasingly out of touch viewer’s nerves, thus
cementing my status as an aging filmgoing curmudgeon, It may very well be the ideal mode of
entertainment for a short attention span set, more comfortable with short
bursts of information being dropped continuously in their laps. Perhaps they
are even picking up on the bigger worldview concerns just hinted at and
absorbing all the implied character traits of the cartoonish figures. I
can’t help but wonder, though, if the interjection of some more traditional
sensibilities might allow for everyone who comes across the movie to take away
a bit more of the story’s potential significances than the way it is now.
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