My guess is that mainstream Japan is as riddled with bizarre, mythology-laden nonsense as the Hollywood mainstream is with loud, action extravaganzas. Through calling attention to its own senselessness, does Fish Story have anything more to offer?
Fish Story is a movie striving to be an apocalyptic drama, a teen coming-of-age story, a kung-fu action movie and a musical biopic all in one. It’s surprising that a film with this absurd a concept can still be pure boilerplate.
Dumbing down its dialogue and pop culture references to appear more pretentious, the director still finds an overarching theme tying all the mess together.
It tells four stories, each with moments of narrative ingenuity, visual flair and philosophical value, but each is bogged down by a retreat to the remedial, the safe and the ludicrous.
In 2012, Earth is about to be hit by a comet, but a record store playing an old punk song is operating as though everything were normal. Quirky? Yes. Mood setting? Possibly. But it dips when the dialogue begins to sound like a quiz show. “This song was released one year before The Sex Pistols. The Beatles had already broken up. And five heroes like the Gundam warriors will save the planet.” You’ve heard of all those pop culture references right?
In 1985, the song haunts a teenager who can’t stand up for himself in the face of an aggressive and pushy friend. There’s a muted portion of the song that’s rumored to be cursed, which might be an intriguing dichotomy in the face of a standard teenage drama. Unfortunately, one-dimensional characters and worse, one-note performances across the board, are not doing the film any favors.
In 2009, terrorists have hijacked a boat after a high school girl has mistakenly fallen asleep onboard during a class field trip. Cue exaggerated sadness at the girl’s mistake, the worthless back story of an odd young waiter, the poorly staged fight scene as he saves the day (not to mention some abominable sound mixing) and the wide-eyed excitement as the victims endlessly utter the line “champions of justice.”
And a year before The Sex Pistols, a Japanese punk band has recorded the illustrious song title track. The band has no chance of commercial success and experiences tension within the group, but we know more or less at this point how their song has permeated the future. Why at this point do we need what feels like a familiarly structured short film of just about any band?
I’ll spare the big reveal explaining the song’s, and the film’s, significance but although the film knows it’s preposterous, it doesn’t make it any less so.
Maybe Fish Story is supposed to be tongue-in-cheek. Maybe it’s supposed to be clever in its stupidity. Maybe it’s interesting after all that something so weird can make so much sense. Maybe. Or maybe the whole story is a little fishy.
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