re:mote voices

Title: Returner
Cast: Takeshi Kaneshiro, Anne Suzuki, Kirin Kiki, Goro Kishitani, Yukiko Okamoto, Mitsuru Murata
Director: Takashi Yamazaki

Returner is a contemporary Japanese answer to the Terminator series, an idea which is ironically backed up by the inclusion of a trailer for the third Terminator film on the DVD. Of course it isn’t exactly the Terminator, rather than the idea of machines turning on their creators, the plot centres on an alien invasion. Aliens have attacked and are devastating the Earth with their more advanced technology, desperate survivors have gathered in the mountains of Tibet, where they hope that they’ll be able to win the war before it happened by sending an agent back in time.

A teenage girl is the agent who comes back to a Japan of the present, the location of the first alien incursion. If she can kill the first alien before it sends out the signal to the mother ship then she can avert catastrophe. The girl arrives in the middle of a hit, a young Japanese man taking revenge on Yakuza child smugglers. He is an accomplished gun fighter and martial artist – a perfect accomplice for saving the world – of course he doesn’t believe her when she explains why she is here. However with a combination of trickery and the fact that the Yakuza seize the alien mean that the man agrees to help the Returner.

Like the Terminator films the action flicks back and forth between the present and the future. The future filled with effects, the alien battle scenes, devastating blasts and technology in the form of shape shifting battle suits (something classically and inspired Japanese). While the present allows a greater contrast between the initial alien contacts, and the little toys that the Returner has brought back in time with her – playing off against the more traditional scenes of yakuza and revenge scenarios.

The Returner looks good and is fun, building a suitable amount tension with the idea that perhaps there is no way to avert the alien war after all.