Takashi Miike’s new film God’s Puzzle should come with a warning label: “Mind bending physics ahead.” This time around, Miike takes on physics, the origin of the universe, mortality and, essentailly, all of the “big questions” that plague humanity. The result is, as expected, a potpourri which sometimes works and sometimes confuses.
Boiled down, this is a somewhat simple story. Through a convoluded series of events, Saraka, a 17 year-old genious (who may or may not be an alien) working on her master’s thesis meets a distracted guy who works at a sushi restaurant and fancies himself a wanna-be rockstar. He inspires her to tackle the big questions, namely does God continue to exhist if humans can create a universe. Dopey boy makes assumptions, asks simple questions and helps Saraka stumble on the answer.
It all sounds fairly kosher but the road is twisty and sometimes, down right confusing. For the most part, Miike’s film feels like a physics lesson. Equasions, theories, unanswerable questions; I could overlook them all if they were moving the plot along but for the most part, they feel like the meditations of a fascinated filmmaker. To make matters worse, a whole lot of it is well beyond the understanding of the layman viewer. On the one hand, I can appreciate that Miike isn’t dumbing down his thoughtsd but on the whole, it’s too much to take in all at once. Mixed along with the university level course material is a story as convoluded and strange as I’ve come to expect from the helmer and that, at least, makes this an interesting watch.
Miike isn’t afraid to paly the “over-the-top” card. Ichihara Hayato, the lead, yells most of his lines and his character provides a constant stream of humour. Tanimura Mitsuki plays Saraka seriously as an earnest, misunderstood teen and the combination of the two players, bouncing off of eachother with their opposite of the spectrum performances, makes for chemistry that is both odd and appealing.
Unfortunately for God’s Puzzle, there simply isn’t enough of the off-the-wall zaniness that has made some of Miike’s other work joyous to watch. Sure, there’s a lot of fun here: the sometimes excellent and sometimes budget special effects are married together in a manner which mostly works, flashbacks and flash forwards prompted by animations that appear on screen seem out of place but it makes them that much more endearing and the film sports one of the most bombastically entertaining openings I’ve seen this year. Saddly, all of this good isn’t enough to make up for the headache inducing moments of exposition (this time all about physics, the math of music and the origings of the universe) that seem to work so well in some of Miike’s other films, including the recent Sukiyaki Western Django.
It’s not a complete dud, there are moments of glorious, over the top joy. One scene near the end of the film was enough to wake up the crowd from the lul of the previous 45 minutes and the exclamation of “Sushi Relativity” is almost enough to encourage a second viewing. Almost.
