Guyver: Dark Hero is an improvement, though not by much, switching out the perpetually awkward Jack Armstrong for the infinitely more approachable (though still kind of cheesy) David Hayter in the role of Sean Barker, a young man whose body hosts a bio-organic alien device capable of transforming him into an superpowered living weapon known simply as “The Guyver.” Guyver: Dark Hero is noticeably darker than its predecessor, doubling down on the depiction of Sean’s deteriorating psyche as he fights subconsciously to fend off the Guyver unit’s invasive bloodlust while fighting crime at night as a vigilante. Adapted from Yoshiki Takaya’s 1980 manga series, Guyver: Dark Hero is the direct sequel to the much-maligned 1991 adaptation, a movie championed for its impressive visual effects courtesy of co-director Joji “Screaming Mad George” Tani though panned by critics and fans for its stilted acting and cornball mishandling of the manga’s otherwise dark and violent subject matter. If David Cronenberg was asked to direct a Super Sentai-style action flick at the height of his “body horror” phase, it might have looked something like The Guyver. Attempts to translate anime to film however are anything but new, with Japan having long since gotten the jump on America by several decades with plenty attempts at adapting the country’s most prolific cultural export to the silver screen. The box-office success or failure of Rupert Sanders’ Ghost in the Shell may prove to be an inadvertent weathervane of sorts, pointing to either the continued support or premature mothballing of this nascent string of live-action productions. Not to mention Warner Bros.’ long postponed and much maligned attempt at an American Akira remake, whose nebulous production status looms heavy over fans of the 1988 original like some vague, ominous threat.
and Lionsgate respectively in the process of optioning rights to a remake of Attack on Titan and a live-action Naruto movie, it looks as though a new wave of anime and manga adaptations will become the latest trend in American entertainment. With Robert Rodriguez’s Alita: Battle Angel slated for release next summer, Adam Wingard’s Death Note remake premiering via Netflix in August, James Wan’s Robotech gearing up for pre-production, and Warner Bros. After all, with superhero and comic movies dominating the zeitgeist of mainstream entertainment and earning some of the highest-grossing turnouts of the past two decades, why shouldn’t the same be true for anime movies?Īt least, that’s what some of Hollywood’s biggest studios are thinking, as evidenced by the announcement of not only Ghost in the Shell but several other anime-to-live-action productions just within the past year. The thought process and motivations behind such productions seems easy enough to grasp.
Allegations of whitewashing and a general disregard for the source material have dogged the film’s production for over the past year, raising concerns in the ongoing debate as to whether American filmmakers are equipped at all to the task of adapting foreign cultural properties with respect to their origins. Much has been said already about the new live-action remake of Ghost in the Shell.
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