The Red Spectacles (紅い眼鏡, Akai Megane) is a 1987 Japanese surrealistscience fictionneo-noir film directed by Mamoru Oshii, co-written with Kazunori Ito, and starring Shigeru Chiba and Mako Hyōdō. The first film in Oshii's Kerberos Saga, but the second installment overall after its radio drama companion piece While Waiting for the Red Spectacles (which aired a month prior), the film follows Kōichi Todome, a former police detective who, after fleeing Japan following a failed rebellion by his dissolved unit, returns several years later per a promise to his colleagues, only to find Tokyo completely unrecognizable and increasingly strange and surreal.
The Red Spectacles was released on February 7, 1987. It would be followed by several works intended to explain and expand the film's universe, the most notable of them being Kerberos Panzer Cop. The film was followed by two prequels—StrayDog: Kerberos Panzer Cops in 1991, and Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade in 1999—that adapted the established stories and settings from Kerberos Panzer Cop.
Plot
In the 20th century, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department loses control of crime in Tokyo. In response, it establishes the Anti Vicious Crime Heavily Armored Mobile Special Investigations Unit, nicknamed "Kerberos", a heavily-armed police tactical unit tasked with combating crime and evil, equipped with machine guns and reinforcement gear. However, while Kerberos succeeds in their mission, by the 1990s their overzealous actions and fanatical hatred of evil lead to them becoming increasingly aggressive, cruel, and corrupt. When a Kerberos member beats a misdemeanor offender to death, it sparks a massive controversy that leads to the unit's disbandment. However, three elite Kerberos members—Kōichi Todome, Washio Midori, and Sōichirō Toribe—refuse to disarm and flee to the Port of Tokyo, where they plan to escape in a helicopter. After repelling an ambush by bounty hunters, a grievously injured Sōichirō and Midori order Todome to leave in the helicopter alone, but they make a promise that Todome will return for them.
Three years later, Todome, a fugitive from the government, returns to Tokyo, but finds the city inexplicably no longer resembles the one he left behind: the buildings have decayed at an exponential rate, and everything is strange, surreal, and nondescript. He wanders, trying to find some semblance of his past and to find Sōichirō and Midori, and along the way encounters strange and unusual characters—a mysterious young lady clad in red, hitmen led by Bunmei Muroto, and eccentric con artists called tachiguishi who swindle inexplicably-illegal stand-and-eat food stalls (tachigui) after they were deemed to violate public order and standard of decency.
In the end, it is revealed that most of the events of the film were a dying dream, as Todome was attacked and killed shortly after returning to Tokyo.
Several of the cast members are voice actors and appeared in Urusei Yatsura, which Oshii worked on as chief director and head writer.
The Red Spectacles is probably Oshii's most literate feature work. Not only, dialogue and narrative parts are prominent over drama but the film contains a variety of philosophical concepts such as free will and determinism, mentioned through fables, like "The Magnet and the Iron Sands" and "The Ogre Saved by the Fisherman", or through classic poet-authors quotes, Shakespeare and Pushkin. The characters refers to European medieval tales and Greek mythology, such as oral versions of Little Red Riding Hood and the three-headed watchdog of HellCerberus.[citation needed]
Releases
The Red Spectacles premiered on February 7, 1987 in Japan.
On February 25, 2003, the DVD edition was made available in Japan as part of the Mamoru Oshii Cinema Trilogy anthology box set, which contained four DVDs and one soundtrack CD. On November 4 of the same year, a subtitled version of Akai megane was released in North America as both a single DVD and also as part of a US release of the box set. The US version of the trilogy box set has different box artwork and lacks the "Revisited Scene & Production" DVD of the Japanese version.
The American The Red Spectacles DVD edition was reprinted in 2004, and since then is only available in the box set which was printed three times as of 2006 and remains the only edition released outside Japan.
Reception
The A.V. Club, reviewing it as part of the 2003 DVD release with the other parts of the trilogy, called the story "alternately hilarious, bizarre, and incoherent, right up to the disappointingly conventional ending."[1]
Blogspot user bloodandsoulsformylordarioch stated from the review article that
"For all intents and purposes, “The Red Spectacles” is a serious film about serious issues, and yet it does not shy away from having Bunmei, the face of the evil Cats, burst into an impromptu mambo for seemingly no reason, or having Koichi become incapacitated by explosive diarrhea that he is unable to relieve because there is a goldfish living in the toilet. These moments appear at first to make absolutely no sense, but when given more thought, they add a great deal to the dystopian atmosphere. These sequences are horrifying; they are completely out of place, and as such, they illustrate the ignominy of life in the new Japan. Under the new regime, the city has a bad sense of humor and a bad sense of timing, and its people are unceremoniously stripped of their dignity."
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