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R2 DVD Reviews
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Friday, 15 July 2011 00:00 |
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Page 1 of 3
 It's the end of the world as we know it - again - and the 'man' responsible, Casshern, has the feeling that he should maybe be trying to put things right. Even if everyone around him is trying to kill him. And so starts a journey, to track down the woman whose death at his hands started the Ruin in the first place. Be prepared for a loooooong trip...
In the near future, an amnesiac Casshern fights anti-human robots on a desolate Earth. Most of the humans were killed in an apocalyptic war when he was serving under the direction of Braiking Boss, after he assassinated a girl named Luna. During his quest to find out who he is, Casshern befriends a robot girl named Ringo. However, Ringo finds herself to be scared of Casshern after he kills a robot who was trying to attack her. Not long after, he faces against an anti-Casshern mercenary named Lyuze...
Lyuze is just one of the people out to get Casshern - rumour was spread like wildfire that devouring him will end the Ruin, a clearly wacky story but when hope is just about gone you'll believe anything. That means there's a trail of the less stable of the world's survivors on his trail, while Dio - a being similar in nature to Casshern - also has his sights on him, although his aims may be less noble. Casshern Sins is essentially a reboot of the 1970s original, with the benefit of modern production values. Values that are put to rather limited work, sadly, in realising a desert wasteland with nothing much to see. Picture Desert Punk, only far more serious.
The world, what's left of it, is now inhabited mostly by robots, who are slowly rusting away as they fall victim to the Ruin. There are some humans left, too - an even smaller number, as human frailties are even more susceptible to the Ruin than technology. It all began when Casshen apparently killed "the Sun who was named Moon", a mysterious woman named Luna, on the orders of his creator Braiking Boss. Don't ask why, as this volume at least doesn't explain that - Casshern himself has no memories of the killing or why he did it, only a realisation now that he needs to put the world right. A task that may be made easier by the revelation that Luna is still alive, and just keeping a low profile.
And so finding Luna becomes Casshern's task, and along the way he runs into a series of characters, each of which find that meeting him turns out to be generally a bad thing. Death seems to have a habit of following in his wake - and that makes him a particularly bleak and mood character. If you're looking for something uplifting, this isn't going to be the series for you, as each episode starts gloomy and ends even gloomier - and that's where the first main problem with Casshern Sins is: I wouldn't mind so much if the series looked like it was going somewhere at a reasonable pace, but half-way through (this set is the first of two) there's no real feeling that Casshern's any closer to achieving his aims. Instead, he's just spent 12 episodes bringing death and despair to more people.
Hope for something of interest came from his undoubted fighting skills: he's a killing machine, indestructible even when the Ruin is destroying everything else, and when he gets into battle it's impressive stuff. But it happens less often than it should, in shorter bouts than it should, making the fight scenes feel more like wasted opportunities rather than something good to break up the story with. The underlying story around Luna is also woefully under-developed: the opening scenes of each episode provide a very short (10-15 seconds short) cuts of what happened between Casshern and Luna, but not why. Who is (was?) Braiking Boss? Why did he want Luna dead? Did he realise that the Ruin would be unleashed when that happened? Where is he now? All of this seems relevant to what's happening in the series, but all of it is left completely unexplained.
All of which leaves me with a series that has very little about it that's likeable. A lot of the problems may yet be addresses in the show's second half, depending on how quickly (or if) Casshern's able to find Luna and if that lightens the show's gloomy mood - but I have to say I'm not particularly hopeful of that happening. I'm braced for more of the same, and that really wouldn't be a good thing. Yes, the end of the world isn't exactly a joyful occasion, but Casshern Sins really does overdo the gloom - and in a very slow-paced way. Not top of my must-watch list.
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