Overview: Xchange is one of those movies that comes up with an interesting if unbelievable Sci-Fi premise (mind transference technology) and then proceeds to hose it beyond all recognition with a horrid script, bad acting and flat out bizarre (not in a good way) scenes. Still the initial idea about exchanging conscious minds is interesting enough to at least keep you watching for the first 20 minutes or so. Whether you care to after that is truly a matter of how much you like trashy cyberpunked Sci-Fi.

The Setting: In the near future, the technology can enable a person’s consciousness to be exchanged with another. So while you may take on the speech patterns of the new “host,” your thoughts and memories are still “yours.” Furthering this technology, a company, Xchange, now uses this technology to enable instant travel across the globe. You just need to go into an Xchange office, agree upon a temporary host (male or female), and plug-in. But wait, there’s more! In addition to Xchanges with humans, the Xchange corporation has also created disposable clones with supra-human abilities that are ready-made to accept a temporary mind transferal. Unfortunately, the clones only last a few days before self-destructing (one might wonder how the development of a full human clone that only lasts two days could possibly be cost-effective, but, um, this isn’t really explored). Unfortunately for society, the near-future has turned onto a world of the haves and have-nots, where corporations sit on top of a society where life is only valued if you are a corporate stooge.

The Story: Toffler (Kim Coates) is a corporate executive who has it all. His one fear is that he’s afraid of undergoing mind transferal travel, or “floating” as it has become called. Unfortunately for him, his biggest corporate customer’s CEO has been murdered and the CEO’s son needs him by his side in an hour for an important meeting on the other side of the country. Due to the time issue, Toffler is forced to undergo his first floating instance. A temporary host has been found at the last minute, so everything seems to be set. While the transferal and meeting goes off without a hitch, and in fact Toffler (now Kyle MacLachlan) has found the experience to be enjoyable, problems arise when Toffler goes back the next day to transfer into his own body. Unfortunately, the temporary host that now is traveling in Toffer’s body has not returned – worse, his current body appears to be stolen, and the Xchange corporation is asking for it to be returned. In fact, it appears that the most notorious terrorist now is in control of his body.

The CEO for Xchange (Janet Kidder) asks Toffler to take on the body of a clone until his real body is found. This is Tofflers’ worst nightmare. Considering clones only last a few days or so, Toffler freaks out and escapes. Strangely, he eventually gets someone to put him in a clone (Stephen Baldwin) anyways so that he can go out and find his body. From the moment Toffler escapes until the end, we get a completely bizarre and convoluted plot of corporate slimes treating the little people like trash, and screwing whoever they need to get to the top. I could go into details, but truly, for the most part it’s about as predictable as you can get.

Scenes Too Stupid for Words: OK, Xchange is almost worth sitting through just to see the quick-cut shot of the CEO chick in the buff screwing the son bad guy while arguing about their absurd take over the world plan at the same time. The narrative called for the beans to be spilled on who the bad guys were, and why they were working together, so, for whatever reasons, they tried to combine the two scenes into one. Truly, this has to be one of the most idiotic sex scenes ever put on film. There are others in Xchange that are pretty bad, where similarly, something has to happen in the narrative but they couldn’t bother spending more than 10 minutes coming up with the details. But truly, the CEO sex scene has to be seen to be believed.

The Bottom Line: The mind transfer technology in Xchange could have potentially been interesting, but instead it is delivered in a completely simplistic and non-believable way. Worse, the surrounding story sucks horribly, and the acting, especially from Stephen Baldwin is pretty lousy. But again, the story idea was at least interesting, as was the bizarre floater bar. And the production values were at least on par with TV movies, so Xchange earns a solid 4 stars.

Overview: Bjork’s video, “All is Full of Love” was the first DVD single ever released. Looking at it, its not difficult to see why. This thing is beautiful, innovative, wonderfully shot. All is Full of Love raked in the awards back in 2000, including the MTV Best Special Effects award, the ITS Monitor award, and the Best Music Video at the 1999 London Effects and Animation (LEAF) awards. As I really don’t have a video category yet, I’m including this in my film short category.

The Video: All is Full of Love opens with a female looking robot is being put together, while she is musing (singing). Eventually another twin robot enters the picture, and the two robots begin to embrace to the chorus, “All is full of love.” Throughout the entire video, the builder machines continue to make adjustments to the pair. The pacing is slow and deliberate, which mirrors the song.

The Visuals: All is Full of Love provides incredibly realistic and high production values. The result is an incredibly immersive posthuman experience. Almost immediately the viewer is drawn into the setting and does not leave until the video ends. The colors are almost all whites and blacks, with minor hues of purple interacting.

The Robots: The absolutely wonderful Robots in this video were built by Paul Catling. These robots have been pretty influential, and most certainly influenced the robots in the large scale cyberpunk movie, I, Robot. Also, I’d hazard a guess that this video also most likely influenced artist Nicolas Leblanc, who did the robots in the Cyberpunkreview header.

The FX: Chris Cunningham used Glassworks for all the FX in this video. Glassworks does a wonderful job of blending the actual robot with Bjork’s face. But really, it appears the process was even more complex than that, as Chris Cunningham relates in an interview with American Cinematographer:

“Every single shot in the video has about four layers. The first element is the shot of the set and the robot prop doing nothing, which we’d film for about 21 seconds. We’d then remove the prop Björk robot and put (the real) Björk in with her face painted white and wearing a blue suit. Using a mix of the (master shot and a live feed of Björk in frame) on the video monitor, we’d then try to match up as much as possible. It was a pretty crude and fairly terrifying method of shooting the video. For the Avid editing, I basically had a series of stills of a robot on a set and some crude shots of Björk wearing a blue suit with her face painted white. There was a definite feeling of insecurity all the way until the first couple of shots were finished in post, when I could finally tell whether it was working or not.” (American Cinematographer)

The Bottom Line: Truly, Bjork’s All is Full Of Love is an absolutely terrific cyberpunk music video. I can’t say enough how much I think of this. Give it a watch.

Overview: Minority Report, directed by Steven Spielberg, is another one of the large scale production cyberpunk movies that cleared a hefty gross (358 million worldwide, not counting DVD sales). Minority Report works both as a summer blockbuster (it was released in June), but also as a fairly intelligent cyberpunk flick. Based on another terrific story from Phillip K. Dick, Minority Report has a terrific cast headed up by Tom Cruise and Max Von Sydow, awesome special effects, and terrific music and sound FX throughout.

The Story: In Minority Report, Tom Cruise stars as John Anderton, a police chief at the head of an elite pilot police program, now in its sixth year, that prevents crimes BEFORE they are committed. The year is 2054, and the ability now exists within gifted, but altered people called “precogs” to tell when someone is about to commit a crime. The Precogs, comprised of two twins and one woman, Agatha (played wonderfully by Samantha Morton), are kept at all times in a dreamlike state in strange pool of water. The Precogs receive visions of murders that will be taking place. Based on an elaborate system that works off the Precogs, the police are able to extract the visions and are given the names of the murder victim and the murderer on color coded balls. Based on this, all premeditated murders have become a thing of the past – now the only murders that “might” take place are the crimes of passion, or “red balls” in Minority Report terms. When a red ball comes, the John Anderton must quickly work with the dreams to find the location of the murder (which often is only a few minutes or hours into the future) so that his team can rush to prevent it.

The end result of this technology is that people are being imprisoned for the crime PRIOR to committing it. Those who are identified by the Precogs are immediately sentenced to a strange virtual prison, where they are stuck in perpetual dreamstate (no word is given why they aren’t relegated to a normal prison). Through a quirky situation, John Anderton is brought in close proximity to the Precog, Agatha – she grabs him and fervently relays a vision that has occurred in the past. In tracking this down, John Anderton learns that sometimes one of the three Precogs actually deliver a vision that differs from the other two. This vision, termed a “Minority Report” is quickly discarded so as not to be seen as threatening the integrity of the process.

Anderton, plagued by the death of his son by an unknown assailant prior to the Precogs, has traditionally been the program’s biggest proponent. However, after learning of the Minority Report, he becomes concerned with the possibility that he has in fact been putting innocent people away. But unfortunately, his investigation into this matter has created powerful enemies. A new red ball vision is created, only this time Anderton finds out that HE is supposed to commit a murder in 36 hours. Convinced that he has been unfairly targeted, Anderton escapes from his former team and goes on a crusade to clear his name. His plight forces him to replace his eyes (used for retina scans at all security posts), and eventually takes him to the bottom of the Pilot Program’s seedy beginning.

Story Issues : Nevermind the issue that the creepy hacker dude is able to jury-rig a vision scanning and extraction device faster than Scotty can fix a warp drive, Minority Report has a major issue with the technology that’s really never taken seriously – the issue of freewill. If precogs really can see into the future and determine that someone “will” murder their intended victim, this negates the ability of choice at that last instant of the murder. While this is eventually addressed (no spoilers), there is no rationale provided for why freewill was ignored. In the end we are left with believing that over-zealous law enforcement personnel were able to convince the entire country to take this approach. While this is a fine plot point, it would have been far more believable had their been some indication that they actually had to do a massive conving job.

The Eyeball – the Ultimate Security Breach: The other issue with the story that really defies believability is that when John Anderton is caught, he is CONTINUALLY able to get back into the most secret areas of Police HQ by using his former eyeballs, which he keeps with him in a plastic baggie. Even though the police know he’s on the lamb, the apparently don’t feel the need to revoke Mr. Anderton’s security access privileges. This is all the more disbelievable considering EVERYTHING in society is apparently keyed off a retina scan. Sure, OK, perhaps one time they lapse on this, but three times??? Common Steven – you’re too good a story teller to let that one slide.

The Visuals: The visuals are sleek and well integrated, with some nice aqua and blue tones throughout. Interestingly, Spielberg usually goes with an overexposed type of shot to make it look almost as if one is looking at a dream sequence. Continually, we get white saturation dominating the shots. While this approach sounds weird, it ends up working wonderfully in adding to the mood of a cyberpunk film that has a massive focus on visions and dreams. As always, Spielberg gives us a plethora of truly unique visuals and mood shots. The best of the movie comes when Agatha

The FX: Minority Report consistently has absolute top-notch FX that adds interesting elements to the story. From the strange spider surveillance things, to the Boba Fett Police Podships, to the mixed modern cityscapes, the world of Minority Report comes off as a truly odd cyberpunked future. At some level, everyone seems to be living normal lives. Yet every now and then, we get a sense that the surveillance society has taken hold to the point that people have all just accepted it.

The Bottom Line: The overall mood and FX in Minority Report are terrific. The acting is great - Cruise has rarely been better, but also Von Sydow as the Police Director, Collin Ferrel as the scheming FBI agent, and Samantha Morton as the Precog are all terrific. The FX and sound If you buy the technology, chances are you give Minority Report at least a 9 or 10 star rating. Unfortunately, I did have problems buying some of this. Regardless, the story issues don’t take too much away from a very worthy cyberpunk film.

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Overview: Here I yet again delve into the world of the experimental extreme Japanese Cyberpunk – this time to watch Death Power (Desu pawuda in Japanese), a movie Glam Creature discovered for me. Death Powder is a very low budget, mostly incoherent extreme Japanese Cyberpunk film with some occaisionally very interesting visuals. I probably would have liked this movie more had I obtained either a decent transfer or full subtitles. Unfortunately, the only place I could find this at the time was on LostSilver.com, a site that presses public domain movies to DVD-R format. All the main characters had appropriate subtitles, but the vast amount of mumbling in this film (mumbling usually occurred ultra-bizarre situations) was only subtitled in Chinese. The transfer was so bad that in some scenes the screen appears pixilated.

The Story: In the very near future, a group of three researchers has captured a very special android named Guernica (Mari Natsuki), and have brought her to a deserted warehouse, and have tied her to cot, with a protective covering over her mouth. One researcher (Izumiya) is left to guard the Guernica, but appears to be slowly going crazy. Two of the researchers, a guy (Inukai) and a girl (Murakami) apparently have just escaped (presumably from some fallout after capturing Guernica) and are on their way back to the warehouse. Murakami tries calling Izumiya and discovers that something is wrong.

They proceed carefully into the warehouse where they discover that Izumiya has gone crazy and is now trying to kill them. Izumiya makes it to Guernica, who suddenly sits up and blows dust all over Izumiya. From there, the movie turns extremely surreal. Guernica’s body slowly disappears into dust, while Izumiya’s face starts to expand dramatically (in a very low-budget sort of way), while Izumiya rips his hand off and Inukai shoots Izumiya with a futuristic looking gun. Things settle down with Izumiya off hallucinating, while Izumiya has somehow captured and tied Inukai to Guernica’s metal cot. She gets free and beats Izumiya to a pulp.

Meanwhile, Inukai’s hallucinations have provided him omniscience. Inijai proclaims, “”I understand the secrets of the flesh.” He sees Guernica’s origins and the ongoing struggle with the scar people, who are people who’s flesh is slowly decaying on their bodies. Things get even weirder from there with visuals of massive globs of oozing puss creatures with eyes, an incoherent video montage, a fight with the scar people, and in the end, we find a very bizarre looking monster sitting in a vast setting of emptiness.

What The Fuck is This Film About??? I fully acknowledge that Death Powder is incoherent enough that attempting to interpret it will potentially lead to nonsensical ambiguity. Unlike others like Tetsuo, which CLEARLY has a point even though many claim are incoherent, this film may not simply hold together well enough to have a clear point. That being said, after two watches, it appears that the death powder is an allegory for technology’s insidious and pervasive destruction of mankind. That Android chick’s name, Guernica, after Picasso’s famous painting, gives us the clue. She is the embodiment of humanity’s destructive tendencies, and like the painting, her ultimate impact is seen with dead, injured, dismembered and torn bodies. That Geurnica is created by a rock star playing an electric guitar indicates that our technology enabled modern culture is ultimately to blame. A bastardized version Christian forbidden fruit analogy also is at play here in that a woman (android) possesses the forbidden knowledge, and humanity tries to access it by capturing her and covering her mouth. The implication is that they hope to possess the knowledge without suffering the consequences.

The other aspect that Izumiya seems to explore is the nexus between life and death. Death Powder explores competing ideologies in examining this question. Initially, we are told that “Life without flesh is death.” The researcher, now fully infected and potentially dead, but still thinking (meaning his flesh is dead), responds to this thought with the following:

There is no death without life. There is no Answer to this Madness.
Heaven exists within my body…dead. But Hell…Hell is everywhere!

To which, the Android, Guernica responds, “Is there life without death?” From an android’s perspective, this is probably a VERY interesting line of questioning. If you are able to think, does this not imply you are alive? But if you have no flesh – doesn’t this imply you cannot die? This is of course completely at odds with the original statement. When we include the scar people – a faceless gang of humans losing their flesh – as those espousing that life without flesh is death, we are left with a losing struggle where living humanity (flesh) is supplanted by our technological monstrosities our culture creates. In effect, Izumiya is espousing that humanity slowly dies as our culture is merged with technology. In the end, all that is left is this zombie-like monstrosity that is neither alive or dead, but definitely isn’t human.

Disconnected Bizarre Video Montage: At about three-fourths through the 62 minute movie, Death Powder breaks into a ten minute plus video montage segment. This occurs after the death powder-enabled android chick states something to the effect that there are far more people to infect, so she must hurry. I’m guessing this is supposed to be Guernica’s Destroy the World tour. This would work except that when its over, we are brought right back to the warehouse, this time to await some workers who are lured into the pit of horrors. In ending it as such, the purpose of the montage seems to disappear. In the end, we are left with the idea that director Shigeru Izumiya had also developed this cool video montage footage, and wanted to include it somewhere. It does look pretty cool though.

The Visuals: Like many experimental films, Izumiya literally throws in every kind of camera technique available. We get tons of perspective shots, multiple exposure shots, different overexposed lighting shots, completely strange camera angles (like a sideways up-above running shot), all wrapped up in a myriad of disturbing visuals. Whether we get coherency or not, Death Powder is certainly creative. I really wish I had been able to obtain a better copy of the film, as I’m afraid the color is washed out on Lostsilver’s public domain version (although I don’t know – perhaps this is intentional). This leaves the film with a very washed out, almost (but not quite) black and white look.

The Sound: Perhaps Death Powder’s best strength is in its sound effects. Izumiya continually barrages the audience with a cornucopia of industrial/techno cyberpunk sounds. We get various low-toned keyboard pieces combined with strange and eerie sounds of all types and textures. If I had to guess, I’d say the majority of the time spent on producing Death Powder was working with the sound track – it’s by far the most polished aspect of the movie. This may not be all that surprising considering Izumiya got his start composing for Japanese Cyberpunk director Sogo Ishii on Crazy Thunder Road.

The Bottom Line: I wonder if I’ve become jaded since watching a number of these extreme Japanese Cyberpunk flicks. Many comments about Death Powder indicate that people were blown away by the visuals and have never seen anything like this – some to the point of even having nightmares about it. If this is your first, or perhaps even second experience in delving into extreme Japanese Cyberpunk movies, than perhaps Death Powder comes off much better. However, as much as I love the experimental visuals, this movie clearly could have been put together better. There is a lack of crafting in Death Powder which negatively impacts the movie-watching experience. Still, Death Powder, while incoherent, is at least unique, creative and interesting, so there’s certainly something worth watching here. It’s for this reason that I’m giving it 5 stars instead of 4. I really wish I was able to get a better transfer of this, but even if I had it, I still doubt I’d be giving it more than 5 stars.