Firstly, to mock the name of this movie is unavoidable. I mean really, is X the best name they could think of? The only reason I can see for it seems to be the stupid tag-line on the box of “If there is an animation movie you must not miss, “X” marks the spot”. It’s not a freakin pirate movie so the title makes no damn sense. Speaking of the box, this cover is just mind-numbingly awful. It’s just the hero with a sword, some dark clouds behind him, an X in the top left with the stupid tagline mentioned before and a couple of clips down the bottom. Worst of all is the second tag-line of it’s the “greatest orgies of battle and destruction ever seen in a live action film or an animated one”. I was seriously worried what in the hell I was purchasing, seeing as actual perverted hentai was no more than a shelf to the right in the store. Luckily, there’s a big 12 stamp on the back, so I could assume this wasn’t porn. Just in case though, I got two or three other anime movies at the same time, to be reviewed later. This anime makes big promises, but can it keep them. Let us see.
The opening doesn’t put my worries about this being a hentai to rest at all. It’s majorly fucked up. It starts off with our hero, Kamui, whose name will drive you mad as this anime continues. How can I put this next bit? His mother goes on fire; her clothes disintegrate making her butt naked, she thrusts her hand into her belly to pull out a freakin massive sword which proceeds to go into her son’s body before finally she explodes into several pieces. I think our hero might be a bit traumatized after witnessing this shit. I know I am. Kamui heads off to Tokyo as his mother told him to. We hear her instructions which become the laziest way of introducing the rest of the characters I’ve ever seen. We cut to each character of the movie as she gives a two second summary of each one. She more or less says: here’s the tough one, here’s the fragile one and here’s the stripper. Could you imagine this in any other movie, Harry Potter for example? Here’s young Harry. He’s good. Here’s a snakey green dude in a dark cloak called Voldemort. He’s bad. This introduction is just plain insulting. It doesn’t allow the viewer to form any opinions of their own and just kind of throws these people at us.
The two groups coming up confuse the hell out of me. The dragons of heaven are the protectors of earth, while the dragons of earth are extreme environmentalists who want to kill all humans for the sake of the earth. Two dudes start to fight, one from each side and I don’t have a clue who’s who. The movie zooms out so I can’t tell which one is giving the ‘all these people will die’ speech. One guy wears a white robe, which usually means good guy, but there’s a stripper on the team so I’m not sure. Also the other goodies seem casually dressed, kind of like his opponent. Mr. white robed guy creates a POWER SHEILD, which is meant to protect the general public but it really only comes into play once in the movie with the desired effect. Because of this wish to protect people, I’ll root for him anyway. Here comes the first major problem with this movie. Even though I have English dubs on, I put on subtitles anyway and the two don’t match AT ALL. For example, the baddy says that it’s a fight to the death between two personal foes but what he really fucking means according to the subtitles is that it has been preordained that they fight. It’s the same basic shit, but the language down the bottom is a lot more intense. Half the dialogue straight up isn’t there too, which makes me wonder how much the people in charge of the translation bastardized it. What the hell anime, did nobody check this shit? Then there’s the action and damn it’s boring. These idiots point at shit and it explodes with Jedi like mind powers. After shooting kind of flashy ass beams, the two turn into dragons (something no one else in the rest of the movie does) and they randomly explode. When the robed guy dies, the POWER SHIELD dissolves and the building decides to explode as well, making the shield entirely pointless. The scene ends with our hero, Kamui, standing on what remains of the building, blood raining down on him and another villain posing, saying ‘remember my name’ and running of. I couldn’t be assed remembering half these names, which I get into later in more detail but for now I’ll just say not to get attached to anyone as the movie progresses.
We continue on to the inevitable damsel in distress, Kotori, and her brother Fuma, where again the subtitles don’t match for fuck. She and her brother are attacked by machine tentacles, further adding to the hentai theory, but are saved by Kamui. As the movie progresses, all I’m hearing when they say his name is ‘can we’, then that damn Bob the builder song pops in my head with the ‘can we fix it’ and ‘yes we can’. It drives me insane. Having met up with his childhood friends, he and Fuma also get a headache and see some fucked up dream of the two fighting each other with swords. Still in a dream state, our hero meets Hinoto, an odd woman who looks like a child but is the older sister of the villain, Kanoe, who dresses like a hooker and is twice her size. The two sisters have the power to see possible futures in dreams and are called ‘dream watchers’ or something like that, but get random ass abilities like teleporting when it suits the plot. Anyway, Hinoto shows him what will happen if the bad guys get their way, people dying, dragons running round the place and the overall destruction of mankind. Kamui is the promised one, God’s representative on earth and the one to choose mankind’s fate. Mankind is fucked then. Recovering from his dream state, Kamui and his two loved ones talk for a while, professing how dear they all are to each other, Fuma saying that since Kamui vowed to protect his sister, he would vow to protect Kamui. Aaawwwhhh, that’s nice. I’m sure they’ll all live… or still be friends at the end…. or at least not kill each other. Too much talking, now for some hardcore action. Two villains come to ‘escort’ Kamui away. One shows his mad skills of making it rain and hitting down leaves with raindrops. Freaking awesome… NOT! The other has cloth flailing around, for what purpose… because he can. In all fairness, the movie picks up here as we see that Kamui is badass. Dodging their attacks and jumping round the place makes our hero seem fairly competent, as well as the death rain sparking off against some energy field he has.
Can’t decide between two jokes
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And so the Dragons of Heaven arrive to assist our hero. These characters are pretty bland to be honest. There’s the joker guy and serious girl (a romance is inevitable). There’s the geeky guy and young schoolgirl who has a ghost dog that’s pretty cool. Finally there’s the stripper, whose only purpose is to point out sexual innuendos by saying ‘you’ll understand when your older’ to the schoolgirl. Never did I think that a team with a stripper in it could be so boring. Anyway, the ruckus of an ensuing battle causes a distraction whereby Kotori is kidnapped in a scene that explodes my mind. Over the course of a couple of minutes, she’s slowly dragged down into a puddle of blood. She calls out, most notably to Fuma standing right the feck in front of her, and nobody freakin notices her hysterical cry for help. The girl is shouting her head off and the guy five fucking centimeters in front of her is oblivious. Only when her head is all that’s above the puddle does anyone notice the hysterical woman but it’s a bit late asswholes. Our hero’s two friends disappear. Naturally, their disappearance annoys Kamui somewhat; however I really have to question his reaction. This so called messiah decides to have a temper tantrum, yelling at the good guys to bring them back, knocking the joker guy into next week. Here’s a thought, maybe the guys who threatened and attacked you kidnapped them and the people who came to your aid didn’t.
We move on to, what is for now I guess, the main villain of the story Kanoe. Like her sister, she has random abilities that have something to do with dreams, though that explains pulling people through blood walls in no way whatsoever. She’s pretty forthcoming with her plans, having kidnapped Kamui’s ‘lover’, which is really stretching their relationship, so that he will come to save her and she can read his future. Well, having put her hand down the damsel’s shirt and squeezing with a smile on her face, for the reason of…. checking she’s a woman is the only non-perverse reason I can think of, her plans change rather quickly. Fuma enters to the surprise of the villain, and is soon discovered to be some second Kamui (Kamui being the name of someone divine destined to change the world). And so my headache grows. If one Kamui wasn’t enough, two is just perfect. Fuma becomes the anti… whatever our hero is. To explain this Kanoe says the name a bazillion times, most notable in ways such as ‘Kamui will always be there to counter what Kamui does, won’t he Kamui”. All I’m hearing is can we can we can we can we can we, like some five year old wanting sugar. Anyway, it doesn’t take much to turn Fuma evil. A woman wearing revealing clothing hugging him, an environmentalist speech and finally the image of Kamui, our hero, thrusting a giant sword into his sister (I can’t even us the excuse that he wants to protect her as the evil plans kind of want her dead anyway). That’s the formulae for turning someone evil apparently.
There’s some really boring shit then, as the characters explain themselves to their respective Kamui. The baddies want to kill everyone; the goodies want to stop them. It’s not really complicated but takes a while the way they explain it. More or less, they have to protect some key locations to save the world. After some dull discussions, everyone eventually heads out to battle. These fights suck. They are just plain dull. The battles consist of each person showing off what element they control, then exploding with no victors, just a lot of anticlimactic shit. The only interesting thing is the occasional Jedi mind fuck as things get tossed about by Kamui and Fuma. One villain also gets his arm exploded off in what can only be seen as comical. Fuma decides it’s important to dress up in the same get up as Kamui. Why? I can’t imagine that there’s any reason, apart to drill into the viewers head that there both Kamui now. Now I just draw the line. Screw it, if this pleasant enough dude who swore to protect our hero was taken in by the environmentalist shit, by the slutty woman or anything along those lines, I would understand what’s going on. But Fuma just becomes pure evil out of the blue. The only explanation is that he is possessed by some dark will to destroy the world, that he will stop at nothing to kill everyone. He starts to take pleasure in destroying the heroes, using bad one liners and all. For example, after killing joker guy, serious girl cries over his body wishing they had been together. Evil Fuma thrusts his sword into her back and replies, now you can (mwah ha ha). He kills his sister, who had a freakin sword in her (What the hell). The only explanation given for these swords is something along the lines of they were made from love in the soul, but I’ve just lost interest in finding reason in this movie anymore.
Anyway, Fuma kills off all remaining characters, both good and evil ones, until only he and Kamui are left. We pause to consider the irony of the two swearing to protect each other earlier in the movie. It seems at this point that the main character has spent more time calling out names than he has fighting, something not about to change now. As Kamui attempts to reason with Fuma, it’s evident that he’s lost it, to the extent I couldn’t stop laughing as Fuma declares ‘Who’s Fuma. Fuma is dead’. With a tear in his eye, Kamui extends his arm and his identical sword (which came from his naked, burning, exploding Mother at the very start and has not been seen since) appears. Kamui slices through his opponent’s sword, and decapitates him (with the funniest sound effect, almost like someone spitting). The movie ends with the power shield discarding all the surrounding rubble and returning the area to its original state (the one and only time it did what it was supposed to). Kamui, on his knees, cries hugging his best friends head mumbling that he was Fuma while his love lays dead somewhere below him. All in all a happy ending I think. No, wait, that’s a fucking horrible ending. EVERYONE DIES, but Kamui, the one character I wouldn’t have minded dying.
Damn this anime movie was bad. X marks the spot my ass. Greatest orgy of battle and destruction is just plain wrong. The characters were thrown at the screen only to be killed off after saying two words, so I didn’t give a shit about their names. There was a baddy or two I don’t think had a single purpose, other than cannon fodder. Now, with further research, I discovered that there were previous manga and television series linked to this movie and most of the back stories are there to be found. For example, guy with cloth flailing about him was some test tube experiment who sought revenge against humanity and he has web-sites dedicated to him, like most anime characters. But those who have never heard of the series, like me, are thrown into the deep end. From this movie alone however, the characters are bland as beige. I feel a bit better though, knowing that this movie was more aimed at those who had knowledge of these back stories and it wasn’t just bad storytelling. Anyway, I think I’ve ranted enough on the action and its dullness. The story isn’t breathtaking and the villains aren’t too smart, one being surprised when the Evil Fuma kills him (even though they just convinced him to kill everyone in the world). The amount of shouting is annoying, our hero’s main purpose being to yell MOTHER….KATORI….FUMA….Try this one, SOMETHING THAT MAKES SENSE. The graphics are ok; I mean that I’ve seen better but it’s over a decade old so for it’s time it’s good. I can’t think any reason to really recommend this anime, other then what not to do for a good anime movie. I’m reluctant to mock the story that much as it doesn’t have a bad premise. The whole dragon of heaven and earth thing wasn’t bad and none of the characters are anything alike, apart from Kamui and Kamui. There’s a wide variety of bad characters so that’s something. But really, this is just plain bad. It’s not something I’m going to watch again any time soon.
