Gantz (2010)

This movie started out so good, it was almost criminal it turned out to be such completely unbelievable crap in the end.The basic premise was good, for this kind of movie that is:1. A bunch of guys die for several reasons. 2. The end up in a room with a mysterious black globe.3. The globe gives them missions to kill UFOs residing in Japan. Hinting that they may redeem their lives this way. 4. They are given suitcases with black suits and cool sci-fi guns.5. They are attacked by vicious UFOs.So any person equipped with more than two brain cells would have:1. Donned the suit.2. Quickly checked out the weapon and got ready for the mission. 3. You wanna get your life back, right?This far into the movie, I expected they would, I was eager for what was to come. This could be great!Then they are magically "lasered" away to someplace in Tokyo and the UFO guy is not late to show up. Well not to spoil what happens too much, they are completely unprepared for the mission. And why? 1. They have completely failed to put on their cool black suits. OK, they girl has put it on. And looks good in it! 2. They have completely failed to check out their cool weapons.Not to to spoil the movie, if there is anything to spoil, let me say this as a reality check:1. If I knew I had died and had a chance to redeem my life by carrying out a mission, I would be sure to use any equipment given me.2. If a monster was attacking me or my fellow undead, I would be sure to shoot first and ask questions later. Out of pure survival instinct.3. If a monster was beating the crap out of one of my friends, then, even if I had no gun, I would do something to help out, lest I live in shame for the rest of my life.4. If I was a hopeless nerd like most of the guys in the movie, and a cool beautiful girl showed interest in me, I would at least talk to her.The guys in this movie, though, fail on all these basic point of normal behaviour. They are all prize-winning village idiots, almost autistic in their passiveness, hopelessly asocial towards the beautiful girls that seem to like these idiots, egoistic, craven individuals who can't use a weapon or even throw a stick at a monster in order to save their own or other people's lives. They lack the most basic survival instincts or humanity.As a result, I spent most of the movie shouting "FOR THE LOVE GOD MAN, SHOOT, SHOOT, SHOOT!!" I'm not a trigger-happy man in normal situations... But with vicious UFOs attacking me, come and get some! :-)

The first thing I said having watched the anime was that it should've been a feature length show instead of the sluggishly paced 26 episodes.The movie has greatly improved the story's presentation, eliminating empty filler material.Production values were good as well as the casting choice and visuals. Instead of a niche product appealing to a very limited audience, the film was made into a decent sci-fi flick, preserving everything that made the story unique.The characters had to be flattened to fit the format, but didn't suffer much due to having little depth to begin with. Each one of them simply represented "an approach" with some background revealed to explain motivation.The core is still the same - random candidates find themselves in strange circumstances. They're given tools with no instructions and are expected to figure out quickly what to do. There's no room for error and the reward for passing a test is always a new test.

Thru their deaths by misfortune, various people are periodically recruited by a machine in the form of a dark sphere called "Gantz"(I'm guessing it's completely random since an old lady and a kid were also conscripted). At the center of all this are 3 young people: 2 guys and a girl. The 2 guys, Kel and Kato, have a history but hadn't seen each other in a while. Kel is at first timid, and even cowardly but later sees himself as heroic. Kato is intense and shudders and grimaces a lot (killed his father and went to juvie). The girl is a real cute "girly girl" who panics and runs away a lot. She's got the hots for Kato who doesn't notice or care cause he's too busy grimacing and thinking about other people.A very decent movie with a nice concept but marred mainly by one annoying fact: Time and time again one of these people had an opportunity to shoot the threat and did not do it. Or did (eventually), but then instead of firing again, and again ----and again, if necessary, until said threat was demolished they just stood around with their mouth open wasting time until the threat recovered to attack again (Man, was that annoying!!!). If that won't get under your skin too much and you like sci-fi, I recommend this. Love, Boloxxxi.

Clearly this is not a low budget movie, the special effects are pretty good. The premise is good too. However the movie fails at everything else, and the main thing that bring is down is the complete lack of logic. Most of the movie goes like this:1) Monster is moving slowly or not moving at all 2) People are just staring at it or running away, even those who know that the guns work really well against monsters. Nobody is trying to shoot it. 3) Monster hurts one of the main characters 4) There's a long an boring cut scene with the cheesiest dialogue you can imagine. Meanwhile the monster is taking a break, not doing anything 5) One of the main character shoots the monster, having no problems 6) RepeatThere are a few characters (guy in glasses) that do absolutely nothing the whole movie. Seriously, nothing, zero. They just hang out, don't participate in fights, don't help anybody, don't say anything interesting.So other than the main idea, the script is absolutely rubbish. It's like it was written by a ten year old who saw the original manga series.With just a bit of effort this movie could've been one of the coolest sci-fi movies in a long time, but it was completely ruined by bad script, horrible dialogue, mediocre acting.This is too bad, good sci-fi movies are pretty rare.