Monday, October 22, 2018

Illang: The Wolf Brigade


2029 AD.  The dream of a unified Korea is becoming a reality…or for some a nightmare.  A war erupts between an anti-reunification group called The Sect and an elite unit of the Public Security Force, The Special Unit.  In the middle of it are two people, Lee Yoon-hee and Lim Joong-kyung, are drawn together by tragedies that define their pasts, challenge their presents and threaten their futures.  Amidst a bloody city and a secret war within the Public Security Force, Lim and Lee’s bond will be tested and soon, they’ll come face to face with a secret group determined to keep the Special Unit alive at any cost: the unit codenamed Illang: The Wolf Brigade.

Originally, Jin Roh: The Wolf Brigade was to be the final, live action entry of Mamoru Oshii’s Panzer Kerberos Trilogy (following The Red Spectacles and Stray Dog).  However, at the time, Oshii was tapped to direct Ghost in the Shell instead and Jin Roh would eventually find its way to completion as an Anime feature film instead.  So it feels a little poetic that the final chapter of the Panzer Kerberos Saga would find its way to live action cinema, albeit made in South Korea instead of Japan and with a few significant alterations to the original story.  No matter what the case, I was always excited to check this one out when I had the chance.  Jin Roh is one of my favorite Anime films and the previews looked like they might do a good job of bringing it back to the sagas live action roots.  Was it a success and how does this film rank up to other live action Anime adaptations of the last couple of years?

It’s interesting that Illang goes for a total change of scenery while still managing to retain a lot of Jin Roh’s original feel.  The setting is now ten years in the future rather than post WWII and the nation in civil unrest is South Korea rather than Japan.  It feels smart to update it like this and handle a very prevalent possibility that the real world is focusing on.  Meanwhile, most of the original Jin Roh slips in seamlessly, from the dialogue to scenes adapted straight from the Anime, particularly in the beginning and the end.  One could do a side by side, frame by frame analysis of several key scenes just to see how much time has been taken to recreate them almost precisely.  Does it rob Illang of it’s identity or mask the stench of unoriginality like 2017’s Ghost in the Shell?  No and…yeah not really actually.

The heart of Illang is still the same as Jin Roh, a forbidden romance blooming amidst the backdrop of society in turmoil and political intrigue.  Gang Dong-won and Han Hyo-joo give both similar and different takes as Lim and Lee, the characters inspired by Fuse and Kei from the original Anime.  Dong-won adds an added layer of complexity to Lim.  He’s still the silent terminator in the Keberos armor but also hides a pain deeper than that found in the original Anime (mostly thanks to a new plot point introduced for the live action version).  Meanwhile, Hyo-joo plays Lee with a bit more emotion than Kei had in the Anime.  She doesn’t feel as creepily morbid as Kei and her emotional breakdowns were well done also.  And yes, the Red Riding Hood motif from the Anime is ever present but not as shoved in your face this time (thankfully).  Sure, Lim is a beast (especially in the action scenes when he’s the South Korean John Wick Terminator) and Lee rocks the red jacket.  But we aren’t getting passages from the book thrown at us every 15 minutes.  And actually, the one portion where the story itself is told is done through a beautifully animated segment…complete with the original Jin Roh End Theme playing against it (one of at least two tracks I caught from memory), that made me smile.

While I did mention the political intrigue that made the Anime so fascinating is still around, Illang does take a more straight up action film direction during the second half of the feature.  New ones are added for this version (including the ambush Lim and Lee must fight their way through in a skyscraper exhibit hall and a new fight scene for the finale).  And as cool as many of them are, ill admit, they tended to pad the running time more than I would have wanted.  At a little over an hour and a half, the Jin Roh anime expertly balanced emotional storytelling and intense action (of which there was very little but done just as effectively).  Illang goes loud but just as brutal and a lot longer than any fight scene from the Anime.  As mentioned earlier, some of these are shot for shot homages to the original.  Others, however, feel like they could’ve been a lot shorter or omitted altogether without much being lost.  I know the Anime had a few complaints about the slow pacing (which makes sense, it was an Oshii scripted story so it’s bound to be slow with reason).  But sometimes adding in too much can hamper the final product.  That being said, watching Lim mow down cannon fodder in the sewers in his Keberos Armor will never, ever get old.

The new additions to the story deserve some further note because they are a mixed bag.  I did enjoy the new event that established why the Special Unit wears their signature red eyed masks and how it shaped the futures of both Lim and Han (this films version of Henmi from the Anime).  It also gives reason why the Special Unit is in further hot water during their war with the Sect.  It deepens the friendship and inevitable conflict between Lim and Han nicely.  And then there’s the final act.  There’s more to the film beyond the climactic (and excellent) showdown in the sewers that im sure will cause some level of controversy amongst fans of the Anime.  For sake of not spoiling anything, ill just say the finale drags things out into a different direction and I wondered if it justified stretching the film to two hours and fifteen minutes.  Still, Illang does all this and more than this to stand out from its Anime inspiration.  Whether it was all worth it will be up to viewers themselves.  Personally, I thought the finale was a bit unnecessary.

Illang: The Wolf Brigade is an admirable and pretty entertaining adaptation of Jin Roh.  The change of scenery worked (even if the overall effect of such a game changing event wasn’t explored as much as it could have been) and the updates to all of the central players was very welcome.  The action taken from the Anime was excellently transplanted to live action.  However, a few extra fight scenes could have been trimmed or omitted to end things on a much smoother note.  Still, Illang isn’t nearly the worst live action adaptation that ive seen in recent years.  It might be one of the better ones but still nowhere near as good as Jin Roh: The Wolf Brigade.  At least it entertained me more than Ghost in the Shell.  Still, I’ll always kind of wonder what a Mamoru Oshii directed Jin Roh would look like.  Would it be similar to this?  Who knows.

7/10

1 comment:

  1. South Korea is a good choice for doing a new interpretation of The Wolf Brigade. What most of us post-Cold War kids don't remember is South Korea actually had quite a bit of unrest at times. Until relatively recently, South Korea was a unstable democracy with the military often stepping in to take control.

    The use of the Unification issue is another good choice. South Korea learned from the reunification of Germany following the Cold War. West Germany spent huge sums to fix the damage done to East Germany by 50 years of communist rule and mismanagement. And it was one of the 'better' communist bloc nations, in terms of standard of living. Now think about North Korea, which is worst off than East Germany ever was. If your a South Korean do you want your government spending millions if not billions of dollars to rehabilitate the North Koreans?

    I of course would have been interested in the larger unification story. What happened to push North and South Korea to even consider it? What is the opinion of the USA, Russia, China, Japan over all this? I know, not the focus of the work but it would be interesting to see.

    ReplyDelete