Attack on Titan (2015)

This is two films, released in the summer and autumn of 2015 and adapted from Hajime Isayama's manga, which had already sold in quantities that made a live-action production an inevitability rather than a decision. Shinji Higuchi directs with an affection for rubber and gristle. The Titans are enormous, wet, and unpleasant. The setting has been relocated from a Germanic analogue to something unmistakably Japanese, and the cast is entirely Japanese in consequence. There is no diversity-casting agenda here, no commentary on who gets to be on screen. The production simply went home.

The human material is thinner. Mikasa wields her blades with competence and Sasha gets a moment of genuine heroism, though both arrive as inheritance from the source, not as an argument. No thesis is advanced. The second part introduces Shikishima, who has stockpiled pre-war weapons and intends to topple a corrupted government that keeps its people docile behind walls and fear. It is a coup against authority, not a redistribution of wealth. The rich are not named. Nobody is eaten for their portfolio.

Where the script does carry weight is in its themes: fear as a governing instrument, freedom as an expensive proposition, the wall as a thing people build around themselves and then call peace. These ideas are delivered through collapsing towers, dismemberment, and melodrama. The film never stops to explain itself, which is the correct instinct and a rare one. The result is loud, messy, occasionally nonsensical, and free of sermons. Part two underperformed at the box office, which is the market's way of registering a verdict, and the verdict was unkind. The films remain a curiosity, a big-budget B picture with no interest in improving anyone. That counts for something in any decade.

One hundred years of walls, one hundred years of appetite, and not a single character asked to serve as a lesson. The classification is straightforward and the evening is saved. I would watch it again, though not on a weeknight and certainly not with anyone who wants to discuss it afterward. Some films are simply bodies in motion, and this one knows it. There is a species of honesty in that which the more earnest productions never manage, and which the more cynical ones never bother to attempt. It is not a compliment I hand out often. It is not a compliment the film asked for. It is, however, the one it earns, and I have written it down in the ledger with the appropriate sobriety and the appropriate pen. The ledger is long. The evening is late. The Titans are enormous, wet, and unpleasant, and they have been filed accordingly under the heading of things that simply are what they are, which is the only heading that has ever held up under scrutiny, and the only one I still trust after all these years of watching and counting and writing it all down for nobody in particular. The wall holds. The wall does not hold. It never matters as much as the running.

Such films exist to be classified, and I have classified this one. The pen is capped. The lights come up. The audience files out in silence, which is the correct response and the only one available. There is nothing to argue about, no positions to stake, no coalition to assemble. The Titans ate people and the people ate back. Somewhere a committee is drafting a memo about the themes. The memo will not be read. The wall holds anyway, or it does not, and either way the ocean is visible from the top of it, which is more than most films can promise and precisely what this one delivers, at speed, with gristle, and without a single word of instruction for the rest of us.