Alive

Introduction

After finishing Versus, Ryuhei Kitamura was looking for a new project and stopped in a bookshop on his way home. He picked up Tsutomu Takahashi's manga Alive, read it all on the train before he got home and decided to make a film of the comic.

Tenshu Yashiro (Hideo Sakaki) is condemned to death for murdering the men who gang raped his girlfriend. Tenshu survives the execution and, now officially dead, is given a stark choice: live or die. If he decides to live he will simply be 'relocated', when he asks where, the warden doesn't know but tells him "some things are worse than death". Tenshu chooses the latter and wakes up later in a windowless cell which he shares with Gondoh, a psychopathic rapist and murderer.

They don't know that they are the subjects of a secret government experiment which involves raising their aggression levels to try and draw out an 'Isomer' (an alien virus which causes extreme bloodlust and power) which is attracted to anger and currently inhabits the body of a young woman in a neighbouring cell. By raising the temperature and reducing the food allowance, the tensions between the two men rise but Tenchu is too troubled by memories of his late girlfriend to take the bait. This changes when the scientists in charge make the woman's cell visible to the men, tempers fray and the Isomer chooses Tenchu as its host.

Video

This is beautifully presented in anamorphic 1.85:1 but it's painfully obvious that Kitamura, his DP, or both have been watching The Matrix far too much. The colour palette is that familiar black with a blue hue and the costumes and industrial settings evoke the Wachowskis' sci-fi blockbuster.

Virtually the entire film takes place underground in dimly lit rooms or under bright lights, this could have looked terrible but the transfer is crisp and even the darkest scenes lose no detail.

Audio

There are three soundtracks, Japanese Dolby Digital 5.1 surround and 2.0 stereo plus an English 5.1 dubtrack if you have an aversion to subtitles. All three are very good, the 5.1 obviously has the edge over the stereo and, whilst I hate dubbing, the English voices seemed to fit quite well.

Extra Features

All these are in Japanese with forced English subtitles, though oddly (with the exception of the trailer) presented in fullscreen 4:3.

The 26 minute making of consists of interviews and behind the scenes footage and is a interesting and informative look at how the project came about and shows such things as the wire work and green screen shooting.

There are over 40 minutes of interviews with the director, Ryuhei Kitamura and actors Hideo Sakaki, Ryo and Koyuki.

The stills gallery consists of 25 images which have to be manually navigated.

There is also the theatrical trailer.

Conclusion

I really enjoyed Ryuhei Kitamura's debut, the zombie/yakuza film Versus, and it's a bit of a mystery why this follow up has taken 6 years for this to become available on DVD in the UK - maybe it's something to do with his upcoming film Midnight Meat Train.

Alive starts off intriguingly enough with a dilemma straight out of Nikita - to be killed or make a blind choice to stay alive - and the initial exchanges in the cell are reminiscent of Cube, but it sags and drags its way from one thing to another before Tenshu hosts the Isomer and, basically, turns into Neo at the end of The Matrix! He can stop bullets, fire people into the wall by using the power of his mind and control his environment.

This is a bit of a reference fest which is n uneasy mix of action and exposition, people are either fighting or talking and there are several occasions where I wanted Kitamura to get on with it, longing for the Kung Fu madness of Versus. I haven't read the source material so I don't know how faithful this is but I doubt that it was as stop-start and reference heavy as the film adaptation.

I enjoyed bits of this but it didn't flow enough to hold my attention and I had to re-watch some of it to try and understand what the hell was going on. It doesn't have the energy of Versus but it's still worth a look for fans of Kitamura's work.