Movie Review: Doragon Heddo (Dragon Head) 2003

Dragon Head is post apocalyptic disaster manga by Minetaro Mochizuki.This was very weird Japanese movie. The major theme in the books is fear. As the woman in the ruined village said, a balance needs to be found between feeling fear and giving into it. Another theme is mystery. It is never stated exactly what happened. The characters guess that a meteor hit Mount Fuji, but it seems that the researcher had something to do with it—perhaps by assassinating the Japanese government, or by use of the nuclear weapons. It is also not stated what condition the rest of the world is in—we learn that some of them have unavailable governments, but they seem to still have a working military. We do not learn any more than the characters. Plot evolves around boy and girl who have awakened on train that was trapped in tunnel, and they realize that something is gone very wrong with the world. Whole Japan is covered in ashes, and everything is in post apocalyptic state, ruins and crazy people all around. They say it's the Earth magnetic field that is causing humans to go mad and be more violent and aggressive. And we have giant volcano that erupts every once in a while and rains down fireballs from the sky, so I guess something is gone wrong with Earth's core. So we follow journey of those two teenagers on their way trying to find safe harbor and remains of human civilization. Human survivors find food storages deep underground in cases of catastrophes like that, but that food is genetically changed. Persons who eat it, became drugged and lose all their feelings, just became puppets, that was also very strange part of the movie, as I said it's not clearly stated why such food is developed, is it government's doing or what. Acting is very good, music is also very good. Movie remind me little on ''lord of the flies'' but with Japanese touch. Effects are also on high level and awesome. Some scenes are little shockful and too violent, but that's just that dose of weirdness that we find in Japanese movies. All in all, very nice movie, sometimes it's slow paced, and it has some weird dialogues, and it's two hours long (I love long movies). I recommend you watch it if you like Asian cinema. You could have fun two hours.
rating: 7/10