20TH CENTURY BOYS TRILOGY - THE COMPLETE SAGA

Summer always reminds me of childhood. Those long, hot, evenings spent outside, exploring the local woodlands as a gang, jumping off bridges to avoid trains and going on long journeys to see a dead body. I'm pretty sure one of us got a leech on his cock at some point too. Kiefer Sutherland was there too. Ahhh, those heady days of my youth. Of course, now I am a crumbling old man I look back with nostalgia at films like Stand By Me in which a bunch of spotty geeks fail to buy a can of Special Brew from a local offie then sit in a park for hours lying about which girls they've got off with. Nothing like real life.

There's a very warped sense of childhood nostalgia at work in the Japanese epic 20th Century Boys. Adapted from a lengthy manga series and condensed into three movies of bottom-numbing length, this is a strange tale of friendship, betrayal and apocalyptic cults. Kenji, a store owner, attends a school reunion only to discover one of his oldest friends has died. Through talking with his now grown-up friends, many of whom he hasn't seen in years and barely recognises, he learns that many of the group have been affected by a cult using an odd symbol he created as a gang logo all those years ago. Lead by a mysterious masked figure known only as Friend, the group seems outwardly benign, but Kenji grows increasingly concerned about their motives. As children, the gang wrote a story called "The Book Of Prophecy" which documented a series of disasters and tragedies that would befall the world. When these events start happening, one by one, in the present day, the gang realise that Friend is turning childhood fantasy into reality.

That's only the very smallest nugget of this endlessly complex story. 20th Century Boys isn't a project for the faint-hearted. It demands attention, concentration and patience. You need to invest time into watching the movies as close together as possible as so many characters and story arcs wrap themselves around each other that it's very easy to lose your place. This package, with all three films and a whole bundle of extras, is the ideal way to embark on this epic quest and, for those who can handle it, it's a journey worth taking.

Let's point out now that this won't be everyone's dream series. Imagine taking elements from Stand By Me, It, Love Exposure, The Watchmen, Lost and shavings of Godzilla and mixing them together in an enormous Ramen bowl. The end result can be messy, confusing and sometimes hard to digest, but for those with the acquired taste this is something of a delicacy. The initial helping is the best; the first movie sets up the characters and mystery in a deliberate way that slowly engrosses the viewer. With the extended running time of each movie, large amounts of space can be given to introducing the cast and revealing their motivations so you actually feel for them and their realisation that one of their friends is potentially plotting hideous acts of destruction. The climactic sequences are breathtaking as all hope seems lost for our heroes and impressive special effects lead to a cliffhanger of epic proportions.

The second and third installments follow a similar pattern - a slow build up of character-based interaction this time mixed with more and more expository revelation about the nature of Friend and his ever more powerful group. Each film leads to an epic finale where the heroes have to fight to prevent nefarious deeds that could have profound impacts on the entire world, but neither the second two parts have the impact of the first.

This is partly because each film takes place several years after the previous, and core characters change as the story progresses. There's no guarantee that everyone's going to make it through this series alive, although not everything is always as it seems. This changing of central characters is most jolting in part two where the impact of the first installment's conclusion is hard to see for quite some time and we're suddenly placed with a character who took a fairly minor role in proceedings the first time around. But it doesn't take too long to pick up and hook you back in. More problematic is the fact that every layer peeled off the central mystery makes it slightly less exciting until you're left with something that feels less threatening and more tragic than you first thought.

Another big problem is that, despite a total running time of over six hours, the movies have still been condensed from the original manga. This does lead to some confusion from time to time as characters, symbols and revelations lack the impact they should have as the elements that introduced them in the book format haven't always made it onto screen. It's a shame, but this is still a very satisfying watch. The discs themselves have decent picture quality, much better than some of the releases of Japanese movies we've seen in the west, but that's not unexpected due to the large budget 20th Century Boys had. As I'm reviewing from check disks rather than the final versions released into the shops bear in mind your experience may be slightly different, but for the most part I found the images sharp, detailed and only let down by a few dated special effects. The review disks provided didn't have all the extras on - only those from the initial release of part one which are a mixed bag. You get a reasonable making of and footage from both the Japanese and Paris premiers which some will find more interesting than others. This is rounded off with a set of interviews with the cast and the usual trailers / image galleries. It should be pointed out that a version of the third film was released in Japan with a much extended concluding sequence. While the film here is the shorter cut, the remaining footage is presented as an extra on the bonus disk. The original pack also came with a 24 page booklet which was well worth a flick through, disguised as The Book Of Prophecy, but this isn't listed as being included in the new set.

What you make of 20th Century Boys really depends on what you think of films such as Love Exposure or Death Note. Stripped back to its core, the series isn't really about this big special effects and the end-of-the-world cults. It's about friendship and taking responsibility for actions that may have seemed totally inconsequential as a child. Despite all the explosions and deaths, the final sections conclude with genuine pathos as a simple song brings survivors together in a shared experience. This moral, philosophical resolution is more moving than should be expected - especially if you keep watching until after the credits (something I'd advise on all three films). For a series so filled with peril and the death of millions, it's touching and brave to pull down all the walls and reveal the central, hurting, issue at the core of it all.

Review by Paul Bird