I am a sucker for post-apocalyptic event films, and will cut them a lot more slack than other Hollywood fare. However, Dragon Head has made me very wary of ever returning to the genre. What a waste of celluloid. No story, no character development, poor effects, and a male lead who wanders about clueless from start to finish. Most bad films leave you bored or listless; with Dragon Head, I was shouting at the TV screen, it was so mind-numbingly stupid.
Some kind of apocalyptic event has taken place while the protagonist was riding the train. What is this event? How did it come about? We are never told. How do the surviving male and female high school pupils come to terms with this event? They don't. How do they grow, mature and change through the film? They don't. They just wander from one bizarre scenario to the next (from a town where the youth have turned on their elders, to a bunker where everyone is eating drugged food) without any causal relationship between the stages of their journey or the events they encounter there. I suppose some kind of Lord of the Flies metaphor is implied by the boy-savage who menaces the leads in the first third, but without connecting this to WHY civilisation has ended and WHY people are reacting the way they are, the message goes nowhere.
A script as poor as this should never, ever have been made. Sayaka is a good actress, as she showed with a nuanced performance in the short film Bean Cake, but even she can't salvage this. This film has no saving graces. Not a single one.
It gets one star, because I am not allowed to give it zero.
Some kind of apocalyptic event has taken place while the protagonist was riding the train. What is this event? How did it come about? We are never told. How do the surviving male and female high school pupils come to terms with this event? They don't. How do they grow, mature and change through the film? They don't. They just wander from one bizarre scenario to the next (from a town where the youth have turned on their elders, to a bunker where everyone is eating drugged food) without any causal relationship between the stages of their journey or the events they encounter there. I suppose some kind of Lord of the Flies metaphor is implied by the boy-savage who menaces the leads in the first third, but without connecting this to WHY civilisation has ended and WHY people are reacting the way they are, the message goes nowhere.
A script as poor as this should never, ever have been made. Sayaka is a good actress, as she showed with a nuanced performance in the short film Bean Cake, but even she can't salvage this. This film has no saving graces. Not a single one.
It gets one star, because I am not allowed to give it zero.