What's stoping me from liking this film.

Yes! Agreed!! Moriguchi is pretty sadistic in going after Shuya and Naoki.

I hate how there's only one living decent person in the movie the second teacher. Everyone else is a murderer, a sadistic torturer, a child abuser or a murderer groupie. It's a horrible misanthropic movie.

Where is it told you should root for anyone in this film?

It's like watching a movie where everyone is a Nazi. In real life I'm sure I wouldn't like Nazis, so why would I want to watch them for 2 hours on my tv? This is just the way I am. If there's nothing to keep me interested then the movie doesn't amount to anything.

This movie amounts to nothing in my eyes, and besides that I found it extremely cheesy, and it tried too hard to get across a message. The slow motion scenes, the indie music, the philosophical one-liners. The acting was horrible, the pauses (or lack of) before and after sentences were awkward, the standing up suddenly/slamming hands on the desk and shouting something (this happened at least 3 times) was so corny is was almost embarrassing, and the fact that none of the students told the police or their parents that their teacher put AIDS in their classmates milk.

Please. All the characters being nut-cases is the least of this film's worries.


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It probably wouldn't be so out of the ordinary to watch and enjoy a movie where all the characters are sociopaths (Natural Born Killers, perhaps?), but a movie where a sociopath goes around preaching "All life is precious" whilst directly or indirectly allowing the deaths of innocents is just ludicrous.
It's not necessary to root for someone in a movie in order to enjoy it, so long as the movie itself has a decent plot, concept, well shot etc. But when the characters are repellent and the plot inconsistent, there's not a lot left. I enjoyed the soundtrack (pleasantly surprised to hear Boris!) and some of the cinematography, but the cons outweight the pros.

I have issues with the bomb. She disarms it at the school, brings it to the mother's office, leaves the unopened bag there and leaves. Are we to assume she rearmed it on the journey over there? At the risk of killing herself and jeopardising her revenge? And even if she did - somehow - rearm the bomb while it was in her office, how did she know that it would go off when the mother happened to be there? I've seen other posters saying something along the lines of "Better Shuya's mother than all the innocent students he planned to kill". Ummm, she brings the bomb to a college. Swarming with innocent students. If the bomb was powerful enough to destroy an assembly hall it'd sure as hell do enough damage to destroy a lot more than just the room the mother was in (discounting the fact that she could have had students/colleagues in there at the time), as was demonstrated in the semi-fantasy of the bomb exploding.

I was really intrigued by the first part of the movie as I thought it might be entirely set in the classroom, going through a series of students until the culprits were finally revealed. When they were revealed about 20 minutes in I wondered how her revenge would be drawn out over the next hour, and groaned when I realised it's one of these tiresome semi-vengeance movies where the "protagonist" inflicts mental anguish on the killer by inflicting physical anguish on others. Making the grievous assumption that someone mentally unbalanced enough to kill feels pain the same way as a normal person. Ridiculous.

There is ZERO evidence that the bomb ever went off.
You are just taking the word of the teacher that it did.. the very teacher who lied about the milk...


Movie Review Blog:
http://cruizd.blogspot.com

[deleted]

Wasn't Mizuki Lunacy?

*Major Spoilers*


Q(?): "What's stoping me from liking this film."
It appears to me that your 'liking' of this film is hinging on the morality of the 'protagonist'.

Related to this, your last sentence read: "In the end, I think Moriguchi is a bigger monster than Shuya or Naoki could ever be."

This is sad, but true. She is not some selfless, altruistic being, and I don't think that she was meant to be portrayed in that light either. For that matter, every single character in this film has some deep-rooted problems/flaws. Do the films that you 'like' have people only doing the 'just' or 'good' thing? If not, then why should this film be deemed 'unlikable'? Something for you to ponder on, I suppose.

Anyway, back to the story, Moriguchi had lost everything she ever held dear and she wanted to teach the kids a lesson (by any means necessary). The other 3 people that died were probably not part of her original plan, but I think she couldn't care less by the end of the movie. There is some visible transformation happening in her as well, which I feel is not stated explicitly.

What she set in motion was a dangerous game which claimed its victims as it unfolded. To rephrase what you said in the first paragraph - "it is ok to cruelly punish and/or effectively kill two kids because they are directly responsible, but the other three casualties are unacceptable". You can't have one or the other, that was just the nature of the beast; others would inevitably be affected by her actions. Moreover, by deciding to take things into her own hands, she has already lost any 'moral high ground'.

Regarding Shuya's mom, I understand the sentiment behind your statements, but Moriguchi was merely the agent/enabler. It can be noted that Shuya's invention would have decimated other innocent and 'uninvolved' people had she not intervened also. While if she ratted on him, he may have rolled out something even worse in the future after he got set free, courtesy of 'juvenile law'.