Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1992)

Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

Best movie ever!

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Hear me out, before you condemn me. WE RELY ON TECHNOLOGY NOW THAT WE CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT IT! What did they countless of millions of people before us do, when they had no technology? Tetsuo could be seen as a metaphor for technology in the modern world and how it impacts our daily lives. I mean we see throughout the film that the man has all this metal stuck to him and growing in him and compare it to how technology has effected us, we have got to a stage where we can't live without it, like the man in the film, the more he fought it, the more the process progressed, until he eventually got use to it. My point is that we use all this technology and we literally can't live without it, its stuck to us like the metal was stuck to the man.I can only imagine when it was first released what people thought! "My god!", they were saying. "How absurd!", they quipped. Alas, little did the people know that this was a cautionary tale to future generations. Unfortunately, we did not heed the not too subtle warning of Tetsuo. The all too chilling end is where society is now - "Our love can put an end to this fooking world. Let's Go!" - this quote from the end of the film can be seen as our love for technology - can put will end to face to face interaction as we know it. More kids nowadays are being exposed to technology at a younger age. When I was a kid I use to ask for a bike for my birthday but now you have kids who are asking for tablets and laptops. I shudder at the thought! I make no apologies for rambling. It ends with a horrific coming together of these two men and all the accumulated metal they have obtained. Tetsuo ends with the words "GAME OVER" as opposed to "The End" after the closing credits.Not as preposterous as you would think...

'This film is not for everyone' is one of those empty sentences that gets thrown around with some kind of films. But if there is a film that fits the saying, "Tetsuo" is it. Utter bonkers, making no sense whatsoever (well, a kind of flimsy one), the movie is an almost silent film with amazing imagery but close to zero story.It all starts with a guy running around after sticking a metal rod on his leg. It all continues into lots of crazy moments that seem to revolve around a salary man that little by little becomes a kind of mixture between machine and human. Like your average Kafka. But with lots of more sexual innuendo (subtlety be damned). It is all quite interesting and shocking, but, even at just a little over 60 minutes, it becomes repetitive and some (or many) viewers will end up thinking: why the heck I am caring about this?, because the film seems to be more a study on monster creation than on telling anything. And that is also taking account the more than obvious idea of man becoming machine that runs throughout "Tetsuo"'s running time.As it is, it is fascinating, but it can't overcome its shortcomings.

Compared to other movies I've seen which I've either strongly liked or strongly disliked, my experience with this one was pretty peculiar. I can't say that I wish I didn't see the film. I also can't say that it was a waste of time seeing this. However, I also can't see myself recommending it to my friends anytime soon or re-watching it again.After a businessman hits someone who recently inserted a rusty, metal rod into their leg, metal slowly starts to pop up on his body as he begins to mutate into a massive chunk of metal.When the film first opens up, you get a couple minutes of quiet and calm pacing showing someone walking down an alleyway. Make sure you enjoy those couple minutes while you have them because the film doesn't give you much time before it quickly turns into a non-stop, frantically paced film with realistic and gory visuals which follows those couple quiet minutes. This film is incredibly fast-paced and it doesn't have any quiet and calm moments after the opening where you can catch your breath. The film is so determined with keeping this pacing that even the credits scene doesn't give you time to relax. I actually really liked its pacing because it made it stand out from pretty much all other films I've ever seen before. It gave the horror genre a great feeling of originality.Speaking of fast-pacing, it also has grotesque visuals and effects to accelerate the film. They look realistic, and it can be a visual train wreck to see metal combine with flesh. The gore in this film is a horror movie fans dream. However, the biggest reason why I think that the visuals work so good is because of the stop motion that many parts of the film has. Considering that its shot in black and white, the stop motion gives it sort of an old, classic feeling. On top of that, seeing the stop motion in some of the scenes made me question why stop motion isn't used much more often in horror films. I feel like it works very good, and it would provide a massive feeling of originality if more films used it. Horror film directors should replace cgi with stop motion practical effects.With all that being said, this film succeeds exceptionally well on visual and technical levels. However, director Shinya Tsukamoto puts so much effort into being a perfectionist in these aspects that he doesn't leave room for anything else besides violence and gore.When I was getting to the end of the film, I kept on asking questions like "When are they going to focus on developing the characters?" and "Why is this whole film treated like its one big action packed climax?". Since character development is so minimal, I did not feel any emotional attachment to the characters, and they just seem like empty shells fighting for their lives. Its great that Tsukamoto was trying to make this film succeed visually and technically. However, as a result of doing this, he, in turn, had to sacrifice character development and depth to keep the outstanding visuals and frantic pacing.Another issue I have with it is that it can be occasionally hard to follow at times. It often jumps from one scene to another so quickly that it can be difficult to tell where the next scene starts and what is happening in it. The most confusing scene is the dream sequence. It made no hints that a dream was going on, and I had no idea that what I saw was a dream until I looked it up online after watching the film. The issue with Tsukamoto's directing is that he assumes you'll be able to figure out what's going on. There were some scenes where I was able to figure out what happened with little to no problem, there were some scenes where it took me a little while to figure out what happened, and there were some scenes like the dream sequence which were so hard to follow that I had to look up its plot in order to understand what happened. There were also a couple scenes which felt completely out of place such as the sex scenes. If your body is mutating into metal, you're not having sex with your girlfriend. You should be frantically trying to do something about it. Also, the film kept on cutting to something which looked to be a sex tape several times. I have no idea what the point of including that was, and I also had no idea what it had to do with the film.In conclusion, I had very mixed reactions to this. While many style over substance films would be dismissed as garbage, this one made its visual aspect so good that it felt like one of the more original horror films in years. Tsukamoto's directing choices helped it to be much better than what it would've been if the visual aspect had been less impressive. Unfortunately, the visual aspect was not enough to distract me from the lack of character development, and it was also a bit hard to follow at times. I feel like there were 2 ways Tsukamoto could've gone about to creating this. The 1st way was to make it like this. The 2nd way was to sacrifice the originality aspect such as the frantic pacing in order to focus more time at developing the characters. I don't know which choice I would've picked, but I can at least give the film a lot of credit for achieving near perfection in the visual aspect, even if the result was style over substance.

Once again, after watching a movie where the audience's general response seems to be either love/hate, I found myself stuck in the middle of the road.I really wanted to like this movie, and for a while I did. The bizarre and captivating imagery, sound effects, music, cinematography and the use of black and white all work together to create a nightmarish experience. There are some truly freaky scenes in here. Problem is, the movie drags in places, especially towards the end, where it seems to go on forever and gradually loses it's creepy, nightmarish feel, and the endless barrages of scrap metal thrown in my face starts to get tiresome. Simply put, when the movie is good, it's nightmarish, but when it's bad, it's boring as metal-man s**t.While Tetsuo has several scenes that are really effective, and the effects look pretty awesome, as the movie went on, I just found myself increasingly getting more and more bored with it. I don't know, maybe it'll grow on me if I give it a second chance, which I will probably do, because I have not seen anything like it before.