User Reviews

*Semi-spoilers*

Darkside Blues starts off with a fairly good plot, a cast of rebels wage a rebellion with a corporation so vast, that it owns 90% of the world and has governmental control. An original concept, what with corporations playing a titanic role in today's world. You are given the impression a true struggle as the corporation battles the only area of the world they do not own, and it all occurs within the first ten minutes.

However, this is when the movie falls flat on it's face. The movie has too many "main characters" and all of them never resolve anything throughout the story, as the movie delves into awkward fighting scenes that are sometimes enjoying, and at other times just weird - especially when one of the "main characters", Darkside, battles huge villains with psychological attacks that sometimes defeat the enemy and at other times do not.

This darkside character, who seems to have come from some other planet or something (they really don't explain or even hint and all other possibilities are non-existent) is viewed as an all powerful... errr... psychic fighter or sorts who rarely does anything in the movie. Why does he never fight the evil corporation despite having the power to actually compete with them? Why hasn't he ever done anything before? Where did he gain his powers from? These questions are never answered.

One of the other characters, a girl who is considered the leader of the free territory, is the main fighter against the corporation, along with a secret member of a rebel alliance. But even these characters do very little and more or less talk about their "darkside" and being "renewed" - these two topics make no sense to the viewer, as they are never explained and you never actually see them happen - despite being heavily talked about throughout the movie. How will a "renewal" save the planet from domination? We never know.

Even worse the villains in the movie do little as much, we see some scenes indicating their evil ways, but that is it. They are never confronted or encountered by the heroes until the end of the movie, where still nothing occurs or is settled.

The last qualm I had with the movie was that despite the word "Blues" being in the title, the soundtrack was pretty bland, and only at the beginning was there really any blues music. A major flaw, but only because the movie suggests that quality blues music would be played from the title.

You'll be left scratching your head, unless you, like many others, decide that the movie was never finished, for whatever reason (possibly a sequel?), but that doesn't appear to be the case since one was never released (as far as I have checked). Non-sensual action scenes, a plot that goes nowhere, and a lame soundtrack... if it wasn't for the style of animation, it would hardly be called an anime.

1/10

Other viewers have summed it up perfectly with the word vague, but ambiguous can be applied liberally when describing this movie.

An excellent point is that the movie begins and ends in the middle, so while the plot is interesting to look at, it is completely secondary to the message being conveyed by the animators. Once you strip away the distorted lense that Japanese culture comes to us, this film is full of messages. If you see past the wormholes and mutant people (no giant robots here though) there isn't enough plot to disguise the fact the animators are trying to tell us something. What that message is, could be just about anything. It is most likely a political or social commentary though. I'll give some examples, but I warn this could become potentially dry and/or thought provoking so skip down a bit if you don't want to think too much.

There shouldn't be any spoilers here, just an idea of what themes you might make out of it.. which frankly could come from any orson wells+cyberpunk plot.

A cry against globalization. 1994 was around dawn of the internet; the increasing interconnection of knowledge and people. The trade disuputes between japan and china going to the WTO(GATT or whatever it was called then) and about 10 years of the US hating on Japan for having an export heavy trade balance. I don't remember if the Asian market crash was before or after this movie. Probably after, but if it came before this movie I would point at that as a source of resentment towards globalization. Generally international trade creates losers only of those not taking part, but when your currency goes down the pipe you might not be so happy.

An Orson Wells approach against unified power. We have the UN becoming a leading world authority by picking up members at a rapid pace, and the Cold War has been over for a few years, leaving the US with a superior economic and military power(Political scientist dub this a "Hegemonic" or "Unilateral" distribution of power, where there is a clear leader, as opposed to the "Bilateral" distribution between the Cold War superpowers, or the "Multilateral" distribution of the many warring countries prior to the modern age) This argument is a weaker one though, since people didn't commonly hate the US until this decade, where we start using that power in the middle east. Oh, Japan had been feeling heat from the US congress in the form of trade barriers, threats of tariffs and whatnot since the 80's, so that could spark a theme against overwhelming economic power. Google a synopsis of the book "No More Bashing" to find out more about anti Japanese sentiments during the 80's. I'm sure there are other ways of finding out, I'm just more familiar with that book.

I'm not thinking too hard about it so don't rail on me if you disagree with anything political or possibly even factual that is coming out of my keyboard. I'm getting out of my specialty but it is ambiguous enough that I'm sure anyone with some high school liberal arts can spin some kind of theme about feelings and society. I'm sure if we look hard enough, we could find Christ figures aplenty, and a few characters seem to have little or no plot importance and exist only to be icons or symbols of something or other.

Because this media comes from overseas, there are probably references and parallels to Japanese pop culture, history, or old stories that I will never know, contributing to my inability to understand what is going on, but this is a risk that comes with anything that has to be translated to be understood.

Anyways, I watched it to see people struggling to survive in a bleak future possibly full of badarse people. While there was some of that, I can only say I was disappointed and unfulfilled by the plot. If I wanted something thought provoking I would watch something else. "Akira" is the closest thing that I can think of off the top of my head and it probably beats this title on every level so go watch that before you resort to watching this.

This is yet another one of those films where if I say I didn't like it, people will say, I didn't get it. But I didn't get it, and it wasn't an entertaining enough film to compel me to watch the DVD repeatedly trying to unravel this mess of hokey symbolism.

We never get more than stock characters, a mysterious stranger who might be the key to changing everything, and a band of young rebels who want to tear down the evil corporation that has taken over the world. And even more clichéd the villainess had a pet falcon. Just once I want to a see a bad guy with a pet bunny rabbit or chipmunk. In any event I never got to the point where I cared about any of the heroes. When Darkside Blue tries to add something to this overused formula the result is confusing.