Korean director Kim Tae-gyun and Japanese filmmaker Miike Takashi tender two alternate interpretations of this proposition with Volcano High and the Crows Zeros, respectively - all diverting, popcorn-friendly fare, but each bearing the unique and heavily stylized stamp of its maker. The school setting isn’t really the point films like these get made so that teen audiences - ah, those intense little creatures! - can live out their aggressive, hormone-fueled fantasies that continually chafe (futilely, it seems to them) against the carefully imposed strictures of a traditionalistic, “adults rule” society. To describe these types of productions (most rating not lower than PG-15 or its equivalent) as being “about high school life” is like saying that Titanic was about the, um, iceberg. The fact that these stories are set on a high school campus lends a patina of harmlessness to the violent scenarios - even though the plot actually has less to do with academics than with a bunch of overgrown kids fond of rearranging each others’ faces and dislocating random body parts as their after-school routine. You need only transplant the barroom brawling and gangsta-mongering from mainstream action flicks into the tamer, more innocuous environs of an educational institution, and voila! – Battlefield High School. Planet Earth is one too, according to John Travolta’s alien Psychlo character from his 2000 intergalactic flop.Īaaand… so is high school, apparently – a premise that has spawned an entire genre of teen action comedy/dramedy on screens big and small. Love is a battlefield, as Pat Benatar lustily declared in her 1983 song. Get a taste of high school action, J- and K-style. Also the parody of the Yakuza, as inferior guys who get beaten up by the school kids.A murder of Crows, a violent eruption of teen superpowers… and oh yes, those epic dogfights in the pelting rain and churning mud. This is all staged, and that's clear to us, and it's OK. Different moments in time, and different places on earth, and an important element: this film doesn't take itself seriously, as the others do.
Crows zero genji vs serizawa series#
In a way, this is no different, in root, of series like Rambo, the filmography of Chuck Norris or the urban hip-hop acting pose. The director knows a few things about framing and pace, even though he doesn't take many risks (or none at all) in how he shoots the fights. This film gets away with that single thin notion because it is able to support it visually. This is a thin notion, which probably will appeal to a teen mind (with 24 i'm not quite sure yet if i've ever been a teen).
To underline this, we come to understand that in fact the strongest guy in the school was in fact away from the main disputes all the way, probably because he is not cool, in the notion of the cool guys (he is cool in his uncool way).
The fighting is a fundamental issue of that coolness, the best fighters gain admiration, not for their physical skill but for the coolness with what they get out of the situations - even when Genji is defeated after fighting dozens at the same time, he falls in a cool way. In fact, whenever we hear about wanting to 'rule' the school, what's in fact at stake is being the coolest there. Everything here is designed to look cool. It's an exploration of what it means, in a certain moment in time, in a certain culture (arguably global.), to be cool.
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