Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Persona/Perusona (2008) review

There are certain indications of how well a movie will turn out.  There does seem to be a direct correlation between both the length and clarity of a description and how good the movie is.  If the description says simply that it’s filled with action, but doesn’t describe what kind, that’s not a good sign.  Another indication is how many other projects the principal actors have been attached to.  However, I’m not yet sure what it means when IMDb doesn’t list the characters’ names next to the actors.  (You’ll have to look for Perusona, which was released in 2008.)

The movie is about a doctor, Koichiro Kiba, who loses his wife.  All he’s told is that she died unexpectedly.  He takes it hard.  He’s not doing things with coworkers.  He’s not cleaning the house.  He’s even taken to hanging out at a local park at night, where he meets a strange woman.  When I say strange, she seems to know things about him like his name.  She’s taken off in a van to go back to the hospital.

The funny thing is that the markings on the van match the place where his wife was supposed to start working.  Koichiro finds the woman, but the facility caring for her isn’t all that forthcoming with information.  It turns out that his wife was to be part of some secret project that can transfer memories into another person, which somehow makes them stronger.  Koichiro’s wife is still alive and he’s able to find someone willing and able to help.  He just has to fight off a bunch of these enhanced soldiers first.

This is one of those movies that had so much potential.  The film quality and acting are at least decent, but not much about the plot is explained.  For instance, I’m not sure how transferring memories also transfers strength.  Since the movie is subtitled, it’s possible I missed something.  It’s also possible that no one wanted to explain it.  They just needed people to be really strong.

Also, I got the impression that the wife had some moral objections about her new job.  There was no indication that she tried to warn anyone before she ‘died’.  Her being comatose was necessary for the transfer procedure.  No one said anything to the effect of, “Well, that’s what she gets…” or anything.  For that matter, I’m not really sure why she was used.  You’d think that they’d use someone with combat experience.  Even if you say that she’s expendable, it seems like she had experience that would have been useful to the scientific aspect of the project.  How hard would it have been to find someone no one would have missed?

This is basically an action movie with a very thin plot holding it together.  When I say very thin, there seems to have been no effort into explaining anything.  Yes, this is something I found on Netflix streaming and I‘m glad for that.  At least I didn’t have to spend money on it.  This is one of those cases where the description was misleading.