BLADE OF THE IMMORTAL (2017)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*

I have a nodding acquaintance with the 1993-2012 manga BLADE OF THE IMMORTAL, having read two or three of the collected tankobon volumes. Thus I can vouch for the fidelity of the film's treatment of the manga's premise, though not some of the specific adventures of the samurai-hero Manji. I believe director Takashi Miike was probably faithful to the manga overall, if only because IMMORTAL is a very episodic movie, feeling much like a concatenation of separate, albeit related, exploits.

During the Japanese Shogunate era, a ronin named Manji (Taguya Kimura) runs afoul of a gang of rogue samurai. The evil swordsmen kidnap Manji's young sister Machi for the purpose of forcing him to surrender so that they can capture him and collect the bounty on his head. However, the rogues' leader is so nasty, he kills Machi just for spite. Manji goes berserk and kills all the samurai, though he suffers many mortal wounds. But a strange Buddhist nun prevents his expiration, for reasons that we never know in the movie proper. The nun places "bloodworms" into Manji's body, possibly magical creatures that can repair the bodies of their hosts. All of Manji's wounds heal, and even a severed limb re-attaches itself. But with the death of his sister Manji has no real reason for living, though he carries on with his drab immortal existence as before, accepting commissions to kill evil men.

The mysterious nun then gives Manji a new reason to live. Teenaged girl Rin Asano (Hana Sugisaki) has just lost her father, a master swordsman, to a society of assassins, and she trains herself as best she can to take up the sword to seek vengeance. The nun approaches Rin and tells her that she can only gain vengeance by soliciting the help of a bodyguard-- specifically, the immortal Manji. Manji doesn't want the job, but it just so happens that Rin is a dead ringer for the late Machi. Thus the nun's ploy succeeds: Manji's guilt motivates him to become Rin's protector, which means that he ends up cutting a bloody swathe through the gang of assassins-- whose deaths may be the nun's goal.

Thus the movie breaks down into a series of challenges in which Manji faces a number of colorful opponents. Some wear bizarre outfits, such as Kuroi, who wears the mummified head of Rin's slain mother on his kimono, while others use bizarre weapons like Makie the female assassin, who conceals a bladed staff inside a mandolin. And for good measure, assassin Eiku Shizuma is an immortal like Manji, meaning that he too can withstand wounds that would kill a mortal man. Moreover, he's somehow acquired an antidote that can expel bloodworms from an immortal's body, and when he exposes Manji to the chemical, the samurai temporarily loses his phenomenal healing powers. However, Manji survives all of these trials until facing down the leader of the assassins and all of his other cult members in an epic sword-clash.

I consider the bloodworms "metaphysical" in nature because of a line in which the nun claims she derived the creatures from the body of a Tibetan lama, which makes them sound like the products of some arcane magic. To be sure, Eiku doesn't say how he formulates his anti-bloodworm antidote, and I've no idea if this concept echoes anything in the manga, But the core of the movie is the psychological relationship between Manji and Rin. Initially, Rin is so obsessed with her father's slaying that she's okay with Manji going through lots of pain, if not threat of death, for her vengeance. But as she begins to think of him more like a brother, she becomes more reluctant to involve him in her troubles. At one point she even leaves him behind, planning, rather foolishly, to take on all the assassins by herself. Just to undercut her noble quest, one assassin tells Rin that her father brought his death on himself through his overly strict moral code.

Without a doubt, there's as much carnage here as in any of the celebrated "Lone Wolf" films of the 1970s, and Miike handles the big action-scenes just as well as he does the small, intimate moments between the two "siblings." However, whereas the authors of the "Lone Wolf" series frequently discoursed on the nature of Japanese society during the feudal era, Manji lives in a world consisting of almost nothing but good and bad samurai, almost like a video game.

The denouement leaves things open for a possible sequel, but to date there have been no further live-action films for BLADE OF THE IMMORTAL. It's probably only coincidence that Marvel Comics' own "healing factor" hero Wolverine showed an odd penchant to become an "older brother figure" to younger girl-heroes like Shadowcat and Jubilee, though there's no reason to think that the manga's creator read X-MEN.