They’re interrupted by a fight between Trava (of Trava: Fist Planet fame) and Little Deyzuna, a soldier from Roboworld who’s gone AWOL to race in Redline. She shows him a “steam light”, a jewel that she was given by her father that supposedly can unleash incredible power when dropped into an engine but which no engine could ever withstand (surely this will not be relevant later on). Oh, and the magical space princesses come from a planet called Supergrass. Y’see, it’s just been announced that the Redline race is going to take place on Roboworld, a fascist dictatorship ruled by mad cyborgs who hate the Redline race and the magical space princesses who run it. JP feels like a failure and is prepared to go back to jail but suddenly the hotel room is thronged with reporters. That is only fair.”įrisbee drops by the hospital to see JP and give his cut of their kick back from the mob which he’ll be able to use to pay his bondsman. Takeshi Koike does it for his first film and my reaction is “Yeah. You know something? If The Shining had opened with a title card and a woman’s voice declaring “DIRECTED BY STANLEY KUBRICK” I’d be like “Jesus Christ, who the fuck does Kubrick think he is?” The smouldering husk that was JP’s car manages to make it across the finish line but finishes fifth. So Frisbee detonates a bomb that he planted under JP’s TransAm. But suddenly, JP makes a break for the finish line and tries to win. The mob have placed a huge amount of money on JP to lose and expect him to throw the race. So the race is being watched by Frisbee, JP’s mechanic, and a sinister Mafia Boss. It’s almost too much as it is, to be honest. If you were trying to keep track of a tricksy, twisty plot on top of parsing all the visual candyfloss it would be too much. But I think you absolutely need that simplicity. You wouldn’t even need to change the main character’s hairstyle. Strip out all the sci-fi stuff and this movie could very, very easily have been a 50s B-Movie about drag-racers. Our hero races, he wins, he gets the girl. There’s some stuff with mobsters trying to rig the race. There’s a hard-nosed authority figure who wants to stop the race from happening. There’s a female racer who falls in love with him. Okay, you MIGHT not have have predicted the part where the baby nuclear explosion fights the possessed whale, granted. In fact, I could ask you to guess how this story is going to go and I guarantee you would probably get most of the details right. So, perhaps appropriately for a movie that is transparently about visual flair and detail for its own sake, Redline’s plot is incredibly simple. he’s called “Sweet” because, unlike every other racer, he doesn’t resort to using weapons and competes through pure driving skill in a heavily modified Trans Am. One of these racers is our hero, Sweet JP. Dorothy is hosting the Yellowline, which is the qualifier for the Redline, an illegal but hugely popular interstellar drag race where all manner of alien freaks compete in souped-up science fiction roadsters. We begin our story on the planet…Dorothy…which is inhabited by a race of sentient anthropomorphised terriers (ahhhhh Toto. With this one shot, Koike signals that there will be no corner cutting, no half-assing, nothing less than 110% given to any single frame of this film. Are they still going to be rendered and animated in painstaking, jaw-dropping detail? Yes. Do these shells have any deeper meaning? No. It’s simply a shot of a pile of empty pistachio shells.
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