The full trailer for Kazuaki Kiriya's "Goemon" delivers CGI overkill

by Chris MaGee

Okay, let me start this off by saying there's a big difference between lush and gaudy, between an attention to detail and getting lost in the details, and while there are a lot of people out there who are getting very excited about Kazuaki Kiriya's upcoming action adventure film "Goemon" and that's perfectly fine, but I can't be dishonest and say that I'm one of them. The final full trailer for Kiriya's retelling of the story of 16th-century bandit and ninja Ishikawa Goemon (played by Yosuke Eguchi) due out in Japan on May 1st has popped up everywhere online (I first saw it at Twitch) and the buzz seems almost resoundingly positive, but I haven't seen a film with such a bad case of CGI overkill in a long time. "Hey we don't have to truck the actors off to shoot in front of a waterfall, so let's put in a dozen waterfalls in this shot! Yeah! And if we're going to get these guys to fight on a rooftop let's make the building, like, 30 storeys high! Cool! Then, when there's the big battle instead of having a thousand guys fighting let's have a hundred thousand guys fighting so they look like ants! Suh-weeeet!" Sometimes a filmmaker has to ask how much does any given scene need as opposed to how much can I cram in?

To be fair, if you were a fan of Kiriya's 2005 film "Casshern" or movies like "300" or the recently released "Watchmen" then head over to Twitch or the "Goemon" here to get your yearly recommended CGI requirements packed into only two minutes.