This is one of the movies where reviewers are irrelevant to me. This movie was recommended to me by a friend from Japan late last year. I remember looking for it on DVD on Amazon Japan, but couldn't find it, so I didn't pursue it until I saw it again at Blockbuster a few days ago. But now that I look again, Amazon Japan has both the regular edition and the deluxe edition (with more bonuses than the US version, and a DTS soundtrack). Very tempting.

The story is about a young girl who comes from the future to save the world from annihilation by aliens.

Many of the nay-sayers about this movie are correct: Returner takes a lot of ideas from different movies including Independence Day, ET, Back to the Future, Terminator, and Matrix. But SO WHAT. Almost anything in released now is a rip-off of something else (c'mon, how many times has the plot of "The Passion of Christ" been done on film? At local church plays?). It's how you weave it together and make it an experience for the audience that counts. By no means is Returner award winning stuff, on the contrary, it's just a fun movie to watch. Sometimes fun things don't necessarily need to be original. For someone with my interests and tastes (especially for well crafted time traveling movies), this was a very entertaining movie.

I'm too lazy to look this up, but Takeshi Kaneshiro looks a lot like Samanosuke from the Onimusha games. I don't know if it's a coincidence (like how Ben Affleck looks like the protagonist from the Final Fantasy Movie), or if they actually modeled the character after him. His acting is a bit stiff, but I didn't expect too much and actually was a good counter-balance to Ann Suzuki's part. I have to be honest and say I think she's cute, and that's what made this a 4/4 instead of a 3/4.

The action sequences in here weren't particular spectacular, but was a nice balance between traditional kung-fu fighting and some gun fights, all with common slow-mo and freeze frame camera work. There are a few plot twists in the movie which made it all that more interesting. At the end, I was almost going to give a bad review because it ended on a bad note at where I thought the ending out be...but then the movie went on.

I think it's just one of those movies you have to enjoy without prejudice. I don't know how the dub track went, but I hear it's okay. It's pretty nice that I was able to understand most of what was spoken in the movie without subtitles, including English, Japanese, and Chinese (although I did leave the subtitles on).

Rating: 4/4

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