I went to see Lupin the IIIrd Immortal Bloodlines in theaters today, which is currently having a limited screening in the US before having a digital release sometime later this month IIRC. I believe this film has already been seen in theaters around Italy and Japan, but this is otherwise the first day for the film in France / US and Canada from what I can tell.
I’m going to be brief about the film, only to gather my thoughts more about this film and maybe revisit this thread tomorrow with a comment.
Spoilers ahead. If you don’t want to see them, back out.
spoiler
Boy, I really wish this film was better. As a huge fan of most of Takeshi Koike’s works, I was really bummed out that this movie didn’t live up to his legacy as a director. There are some redeeming qualities to the aesthetic and general art direction, but most of the dialog of this movie drove me nuts with how expository it was. A significant chunk of this movie is characters talking about Muom and how he is immortal, and since the characters are split up for most of the film, it becomes a telephone game where each character is responsible for telling the others that they’re immortal. At a certain point, it was too silly to even take seriously. There are various characters introduced (new villains or side characters) who are unnamed, and various named characters who return, but most of those character either vanish part way through the film with no explanation or otherwise serve no purpose to the plot other than just… existing. I’m talking about Yuel and Hawk, in particular for returning characters, who felt like they didn’t need to be in the film at all. There were new characters as well who show up and do effectively nothing, but I’m not even convinced that these characters were named. There’s also some major pacing issues with this movie. There are sequences in this movie with inexplicable time skips and reversals, and some ludicrous usage of flashback to serve as a deus-ex machina for how the gang wins by the end of the film. I could tell the movie was going to have pacing issues when the movie began immediately, and the flashbacks were doing a pretty awful job of selling me on the sequence of events and the drama of the events from fully-told movies (that were a lot better than this one!)
Hmmm… I don’t know. There’s probably more I could say, but I’ll have to sleep on it. Overall, I’d say that I’m glad that Koike wrapped up the movie and that we finally got it, but I can’t say I’m entirely impressed by the penultimate film’s overall plat. I’ve been seeing people on other communities talking about how this all leads up to the 1975 film Secrets of Mamo, but I still can’t shake the feeling that there are major leaps of faith the movie takes with the plot that are simply hard to follow and not just part of some larger idea.
Want to keep this thread up for discussion about the film, if anyone else on the fediverse wants to talk about it or has seen the film previously in Japan and want to share their thoughts on it.