Casshern is a Japanese sci fi film based on an anime series. In a futuristic society, greedy politicians have prolonged a war until it is has been going on for 50 years. The reason for the war is not explained, but it has left the world diseased and soldiers dying.
After an opening sequence showing the decimated Earth, scientist Azuma and his family are portrayed as quite well off considering how the Earth is now. They're taking a family portrait with falling petals in a lush green garden to the sound of the Moonlight Sonata. But they are dysfunctional, with soldier son Tetsuya clashing with his father before he goes to war.
Azuma, who is a geneticist, hopes to repair mankind with his cell regneration treatment, but the government is having none of that, being greedy SOBs. Therefore he works with an underground group to fund and develop his treatment, and an accident creates mutant humans. The government decides these creatures are dangerous and uses might (guns) to take them down. Meanwhile, in combat, Tetsuya dies when he goes to save a baby, who is attached to a grenade. (Really? Future weapons evolve into something as retrograde as grenades? Military technology looked like it came from WWI.) He is re-formed as the robotic Casshern, who is their last hope to save mankind from the mutants (see Robocop instead for a better film with this idea).
The film doesn't show Azuma doing much scienticking in the film, just overseeing the cloning of body parts and gazing at the re-formation of the mutant creatures, which are basically clones. When Azuma explains his "neo-cells" as cells which can be turned into anything-organs, body parts, etc.--I couldn't help thinking, uh, sounds like stem cells to me. Like most sci fi films, it has an interesting premise but is weak on execution and I think that is the biggest failing of this film (along with badly/weakly formed characters we care nothing about). There is no intelligent scientific discussion going on in this film--it's the "fi" without the "sci."
CGI is way overused, I don't recall a single set that looked like it was a practical, man-made set instead of something with a green screen. I would say the human actors were the only real things in the film but the characters were still cold in that respect. Maybe because this was based on anime from the 70s (perhaps this also explains the outdated science ideas), the filmmakers decided to go this route. But if they were going with CGI they should have just continued on making the actors CG renderings too.
It was too art-for-art's-sake and tried to impress by being visually interesting but instead felt pretentious. If this is a story of good vs evil, the government gets off scott free, barely alluded to despite being the true bad guys, while humans of all genetic makeups just continue this war on a new battlefield.
I formed much of this opinion during the first fifteen minutes of the film but by the end of it my views hadn't changed. It does devolve into a comic book film with a villain, a hero, a girl to save and some rock music. So this was the Netflix that I wasn't in the mood to watch for a month, my instincts were right.
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