Ouch, you suffered though those movies? I feel for you. My con group conned me into joining them at a showing in a local theater to “support the industry”. I rue that day still.
I liked the reactions that the characters had in Gantz towards their situation more than I am liking the way the characters are responding in Red Garden. Gantz introduced the setup to the revived characters differently, but I don’t recall any of the Gantz characters being as emotional about, well, everything as the Red Garden crew is. It’s understandable, but IMO its really, really tedious.
I’m also surprised how “tame” Red Garden is compared to Gantz. Red Garden has violence and some profanity, but it’s nothing compared to Gantz. The lewdness of Gantz is also absent.
I feel the opposite. I didn’t really like either the series or the live action movies, but if I had to pick the better of the two it would have to be the films, because they were shorter, I didn’t want to wring the characters necks every five minutes, and most importantly because skin tight leather looks better on real Asian women. B)
Red Garden on the other hand, I really liked a lot.
I’m still powering through Red Garden, but the characters are really starting to annoy me, similarly to how the Gantz crew annoyed you. In Gantz, most of the “undead” either thought it was “cool” or were pretty “meh” about it. Those who were all emotional over it got over it much faster than the Red Garden girls. Some of the drama makes sense, the drama about them realizing that their past lives are insignificant now that they have a “higher calling” makes sense, but most doesn’t.
By the same episode count I’m at in Red Garden, the main characters in Gantz had figured out how to use their “superpowers”. In Red Garden, they first used their powers in Episode 2 and it has been episodes and they still haven’t even tried to learn how to harness them.
In Gantz, the “superpowers” and the weird guns were required to kill their enemies. In Red Garden, the once-fearsome and dramatic enemy, who was even shown to be bulletproof, was killed by a baseball bat. That took a lot of the suspense away.
I just didn’t care for the movies as they completely dropped the ball on the plot, which added insult to injury as the Gantz anime also dropped the ball. 2 wrongs didn’t make a right. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a law in Japan that dictated that all Japanese live action movies and shows had to be laughably bad in all regards as it would explain a lot.
I can’t say that the women of the live-action movie were particularly appealing to me, so the movies didn’t have that going for 'em in my “critique”.
It seems like people are almost incapable of making a decent movie based off of an anime/manga/game or anything except a book. I think a lot of it is because marketing doesn’t want to spend a lot of money on it, they have always been so bad it’s considered a studio risk and therefore under budgeted, and the mediums allow you to do different things. I’d like it if a studio would put everything they can behind at least one project in terms of talent and marketing. Just to see how it goes. Kinda like the new resurrection of superhero movies.
I’ve always been preferential to Gantz. It doesn’t get bogged down in the drama but still explores the natural human responses to an over-the-top situation.
This started with the potential to outdo Gantz, but unless it stops focusing almost exclusively the Oxygen/Lifetime Network girl-drama and gets back to the purported plot soon I don’t see that happening, which is a shame.
I’m trusting all of you who said that this show was worthwhile here
I noticed, but as you might have noticed my post references others in this thread. Wouldn’t make a whole heck of a lot of sense over in the other thread.
So I finally got this off of my backlog over the past couple days.
I have to say, though I could have lived without the gratuitous gore, nudity and sex, this was actually a pretty good series.
My only real complaint about how it was done, was the constant flash backs all the damn time and the very unnecessary recap parts at the beginning of each episode.
But those are what made Gantz, well, Gantz. The “because I knew you’d say yes” bit was iconic.
It was definitely unique in its harem aspects, that’s for sure.
What’d you think of the ending that they had to create specially for the anime?
If only funi hadn’t snagged it as I’ve still only seen this show in Japanese (I recall liking the jdub) and funi is complicating my efforts to watch the dub legally.
On a some what philosophical level, I was fine with it.
spoiler
Kurono got “revenge” on most of the people in his recent past that either wouldn’t help him with the bum or made his life difficult in some fashion.
At the cost of losing those he cared for.
How I view the end is, since Gantz disappeared from the room, Kurono made the time limit at the end. He gets a “second chance” of sorts, only to “live” out his life alone and broken for the rest of it, however short that may be.