Movie Review on 20th Century Boys...

I bought the DVD Last month but I got no time watch it until today, YES!I`ve finished watchin it and now I`m going to do the review..


20th Century Boys is a hugely popular sci-fi mystery manga created by Naoki Urasawa, he`s well known through his manga Monster(Try to watch Monster, you`ll definitely love it if you`re a fan of psychological horror/detective fiction). It has sold over 20 million copies, and won many awards, including a 2001 Kodansha Manga Award in the General category, an Excellence Prize at the 2002 Japan Media Arts Festival, and the 2003 Shogakukan Manga Award in the General category.

Yukihiko Tsutsumi’s live-action movie adaptation of 20th Century Boys is one of the Japanese movie industry’s biggest undertakings to date. It has a budget of six billion yen, and it will ultimately have a speaking cast of some 300 people, including many of the country’s most popular actors and comedians.

Although the story is told in a disjointed manner, chronologically it begins in 1969. This was an important year, the year before Expo ‘70, which highlighted both the state-of-the-art technology of the time, and Japan’s technological achievements.

The central character of this first movie in the trilogy is Kenji, who is - as it opens - studying at elementary school. He and his friends Otcho, Maruo, Yoshitsune, Mon-chan, Donkey, Yukiji and Fukube, have built a secret hideaway, which is their escape from the world, and particularly from two bullying twins. In their hiding place, they have all been contributing ideas to a manga drawn by Kenji, which they call the Book of Prophecy. In the crudely drawn book, the world is threatened by villains who are using an ebola-like virus to kill people, and who ultimately make a robot that will rampage through the city.

These childhood scenes are intercut with a story set in the 1990s. Kenji, now played by Toshiaki Karasawa, is - now in his thirties - running the family convenience store. Still single, he is also looking after his niece, Kanna, the illegitimate child of his older sister, who has since left home. He is also taking care of his elderly mother.

Mysteries start developing around him when the family of one of his university professors and the professor himself, an expert in robotics, disappears. Soon he hears that his friend Donkey has committed suicide. At a school reunion, many of his former school friends are talking about a mysterious religious cult, led by a figure known as “Friend”. Adding to the mystery, people in some places are coming down with a disease that makes them bleed profusely and die in a matter of minutes. Kenji also learns that the cult is planning to destroy the world on New Year’s Eve of 2000.

Kenji’s friends realize that the symbol that the cult uses is the one that they had come up with for their book of prophecy and their gang. Not only that, all these events appear to be based on that book. But who read it? And why is the sect basing its activities on what this bunch of schoolchildren created, unless one of them is really the anonymous “Friend” who dominates the cult?

In their childhood book, the gang realized that all nine of them would have to work together to save the world. In their humdrum adult lives, although most of them are not the stuff of heroes, they decide that they will probably have to do just that.

After turning up at one of the cult’s meetings, Kenji is under surveillance by Frined and the cult members. It soon becomes clear that they are also interested in his young niece Kanna, who possesses some kind of supernatural powers. Several members of the group try to kidnap her, but succeed only in burning down the family store. They also manage to convince the authorities that Kenji is the true terrorist and threat to society. He becomes a fugitive, even as he gathers his old friends together.

One of those friends is Otcho, played by Etsushi Toyokawa He’s become something of a martial artist, after having lived in Bangkok for some time and taken on work as a fighter. When Otcho returns to Japan, Kenji leads him to an abandoned subway station in which he and the others have been gathering for some time. The group begins, by referring to their old Book of Prophecy, to come up with a plan to stop the end of the world. In the manga, an unnamed building will explode as the final confrontation would take place. As they are trying to figure out which one it is, the Japanese National Diet Building explodes.

On the eve of the millennium, December 31st, 2000, a giant robot appears and begins rampaging across the city, spraying a liquid containing the lethal virus that has been causing deaths all around the world. Kenji and the others decide, whatever the cost, to confront the machine.

One of the most interesting things about “20th Century Boys” as a movie is that it mixes so many genres, and so many characters, and welds them into a massive sprawling piece. There’s the childhood reminiscence genre, the mystery genre, the samurai genre, and finally that much-loved element of Japanese movies, the giant-city trashing monster.

If you stay until the end of the credits, you’ll see a preview for the next installment of the movie, which takes place in a dystopian future where the cult has taken over the country, running it somewhat in the style of Orwell’s “1984″, and in which Kenji’s niece Kanna has become a rebel.



It’s a complex story with many characters to follow, and director Yukihiko Tsutsumi, does a relatively good job of mixing the various timelines. You can follow the story, although you’ll probably get more from it if you know the original. Some things that appeared in the manga are barely hinted at here. The movie also doesn’t do a bad job of slipping from one genre style to the next, although it does get a little too talky at some points due to the amount of information that has to be communicated.

At other moments, the movie uses its enormous budget to film overseas. We see the effects of the virus in London, Paris, and New York, to name a few, and other scenes are shot in Bangkok. Fans of the manga have also been very impressed by the casting. Not only are many of Japan’s biggest stars involved, they look and act very close to the original characters in the comics. The computer graphics at the end, as the robot goes on its rampage, is as impressive as it needs to be. Much more atmospheric than the battles of the robots in “Transformers”.




You may find 20th Century Boys a little disjointed, and a little hard to follow in places, but it does all come together. Die-hard fans of the manga will undoubtedly be disappointed by the fact that not everything can be crammed in, and by the fact that they’ll have to wait until next year for the next installment. For the rest of us, it gives a window to the breadth of creativity of Naoki Urasawa, and to what’s ultimately going to be one of the biggest Japanese movie projects ever.