Director: Yûsuke Ishida
Year: 2023
Country: Japan
Alternate Titles: Zom 100: Zombie ni Naru made ni Shitai 100 no Koto
Genre: Zombie; Horror/Comedy
Plot:
After working for a soul-crushing company, a disenfranchised worker's world is thrown into chaos when a zombie apocalypse strikes and prevents him from going to work, and when he realizes there's a chance he might die uses it as a motive to complete the items on his bucket list before he dies.
Review:
There's quite a lot to like with this one. Among the better features is the solid setup that provides a great touch on the modern workplace experience in Japan. The initial optimism and eagerness to work for a high-profile corporation at the beginning, when he was hired, was almost immediately wiped out and turned into the type of depressed, dejected worker who exists solely to crunch the numbers and perform paperwork. The relentless bullying he experiences from his superiors, belittling him for trying to think outside what they want in a mindless drone, causes him to give up his dreams and desires to continue working speaks quite heavily to the type of culture experienced there. The constant overtime and lack of personal time for little pay and no social life drive him to the point of looking at the zombie apocalypse as a way to escape having a job to go to. The contrast makes for a striking indictment of how workers and various employees are handled in this type of system, which gets brought to the forefront even moreso once the group arrives at the aquarium, which brings that structure once again into his life after having the freedom to do whatever he wanted. It all creates a rather dynamic story that keeps this moving along nicely.
As well, there's quite a lot to like once the film starts bringing in the zombies more prominently. The initial swarming scenes of the creatures running wild in the city and taking out civilians trying to escape or seek shelter in the local surroundings only bring more zombies towards them, which gives quite a lot to like. This becomes quite heavily focused later on as the two start bumping into survivors and try to save those they come across, resulting in some big encounters throughout the city to some rather fun scenes of them using some impressive defensive tactics to stay out of their grasp, which nicely mixes comedic touches with sincere ones for a nice bit of suspense. That type of sequence is repeated nicely throughout the rest of the encounters, where a mix of comedic touches, genuine thrills, and high-stakes spectacle makes for a series of solid times letting the practical effects and just enough CGI bring about some fun scenes trying to escape from the creatures. As there are some solid surprises thrown in along the way to move the film along, there's quite a lot to really enjoy here.
There are some issues with this one that hold it down. The main drawback here is the confusingly abrupt nature of how he comes to start the titular bucket list. This concept comes about out of nowhere and after only one real experience with the zombies, on the first day no less, so its induction into the film feels somewhat short-sighted. Most of the items on the list itself just seem randomly thrown in as well, so the whole concept has very little build-up or emotional impact. It all serves as a means of keeping the zombies front and center while he carries out these tasks for his life-affirming lesson, which is quite distressing. The other issue here is the rather overlong running time, where it feels the length quite prominently. Constantly running into characters and different scenarios of trying to be the hero causes there to be a lot of fun action, but it also ends up making for a markedly obvious excessive running time. It becomes far more obvious once the group gets to the actual attempts at carrying out the bucket list, but there's still a lot of the film spent carrying on to beef up the running time. Otherwise, there's not a lot to dislike here.
Overview: ****/5
Featuring plenty of strong positives and only a few drawbacks, this one comes off incredibly well, even if the drawbacks do prevent it from reaching the upper echelons of the genre as a result. Viewers curious about the adaptation of the source material, who are big into Asian horror, or are massive zombie film fans, in general, should be the main audience for this one, while those who don’t appreciate any of these factors should heed caution with it.
This review was originally published on Asian Movie Pulse and is gratefully reprinted with their cooperation.
Comments
Post a Comment