Evidently, this Japanese author, Satoshi Ito (who went by the pen name Project Itoh), was buddy-buddy with Hideo Kojima. Kojima even let him write the novelization of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. Based on that and the trailers, I expected a lot of near-future military porn and navel gazing. In reality, Ito took a lot of Kojima's basic ideas and themes and did them about a hundred times better in Genocidal Organ.
The film follows a US supersoldier in a cutting edge black ops team that specializes in that American classic, assassinating heads of state who don't bow down to Big Daddy 'Merica. Thankfully, the movie goes in hard on the idea that our lead is a puppet and his reasons for being a dog of America are shallow and unjustifiable at best. At that's just the appetizer.
The rise of the surveillance state after 9/11, the way Americans dupe ourselves into trading away more and more of our freedoms and civil liberties for less and less "security," how ineffective and counterproductive the war on terror is, how most Americans are perfectly fine with buying Starbucks on the way to a soul-sucking job and numbing ourselves to our failure with lame creature comforts like delivery pizza and pointless trash ordered off of Amazon, the way humans are communal creatures meant to work together but the modern world and its pervasive materialism has perverted our natural state and turned our basic survival strategies against us, America's knack for sacrificing countless countries and turning them into living hellholes with some thin justification that we're fighting them there so we won't have to fight them here -- it's all here, baby.
Satoshi Ito is like a grownup Hideo Kojima. Instead of watching the author jerk himself off with awful dialogue and cringe-worthy scenes that are clearly meant to be Kojima's idea of "genius," we get a Japanese creative who can boil down his ideas and bring them to a razor sharp focus in his screed against American imperialism. I never cringed my way through any of Genocidal Organ's conversations or got lost in scenes that overstayed their welcome. Ito keeps it tight, and he keeps it real.
The ending of GO alone is worth a watch for the way it fucks over America.
watched it after reading this post and really enjoyed it
reading the wiki entry for the book it's based on it sounds like it goes even harder with the anti-imperialism
I'm happy to hear that!
Ito stays on point with the anti-imperialism, anti-authoritarianism, and anti-militarism in most of his work.
If you like Genocidal Organ, you might like the other two movies based on Ito's work, forming a thematic trilogy.
Genocidal Organ might wind up spoiling you, as it is far and away the best of the bunch in my eyes. The Empire of Corpses isn't bad, but it gets a pretty goofy in the third act and goes full anime. At least it's fun in a popcorn way because it feels like Ito doing his best impression of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Harmony is a pretty strong attack on surveillance states, but it eventually moves into a meditation on the nature of human consciousness and individuality. It's not bad. It just wasn't as strong as Organ or as fun as Empire.