Bleach (2018)

The 2018 live-action adaptation of Tite Kubo's manga arrives with a katana, a grim reaper, and a great deal of solemnity about the afterlife. Ichigo Kurosaki sees ghosts, meets Rukia Kuchiki, and inherits the duties of a Soul Reaper, which involve purifying monstrous Hollows and discovering that the bureaucracy of death keeps meticulous rules. Director Shinsuke Sato keeps the machinery humming. The mythology is outlined clearly, perhaps too clearly, for anyone who wandered in without having read a single panel.

We searched for signs of contemporary social consciousness and found the cupboards bare. The cast is uniformly Japanese, which is faithful to the source and offers no commentary on anything. Rukia has genuine agency in the opening act before the plot politely ushers her aside so Ichigo can have his arc, a structural habit that several critics noted without the film ever arguing a point about it. There are no LGBTQ themes, no climate anxiety, no takedowns of wealth, no celebration of bodies in all their forms, no neurodivergent protagonists. The villain is a Hollow who killed a mother. That is the whole of the moral universe on offer here.

What remains is action, swords, and a young man shouting at the sky. The film has no interest in lecturing us about our society, and for that we can be quietly grateful. It is a faithful adaptation of a shonen manga, which is to say it concerns power, duty, and punching ghosts. The classification is unambiguous. We assign it no social score to speak of, and we do so without complaint. Sometimes a katana is just a katana.