Film review: live-action Attack on Titan — a supersized zombie flick
One of the most perversely original fantasy movies in recent memory, this adaptation of a Japanese manga series is a schizophrenic mix of genres
It opens todeceptively peaceful scenes at a crowded market and then up a slanted meadow, where three young friends — Eren (Haruma Miura), Mikasa (Kiko Mizuhara) and Armin (Kanata Hongo) — ponder what lies beyond the sky-high concrete wall surrounding the finite territory they call home.
For the past 100 years, the remaining humans in this post-apocalyptic world have been living in voluntary captivity to shelter themselves from "Titans" — creepy-looking giants with neither reproductive systems nor a need for food, but which keep devouring humans nonetheless.
This existentialist meditation on free will and murderous impulses may be worthy of Kafka or Camus, but — the first in the two-part live-action adaptation of Hajime Isayama's manga series — is one of the most perversely original fantasy movies in recent memory.
Once the outer wall has been breached and the Titans begin their genocide, this genre-mixing spectacle by Shinji Higuchi — who's slated to co-direct a 2016 reboot of the definitive monster film becomes relentlessly bleak and gory, like a zombie flick operating on the grandiose scale of a disaster film.
