EIGHT MAN (1992)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological*

I've never read any of the 1960s EIGHT MAN manga, but I followed the dubbed anime series of that same decade. I don't know how similar the two were, but I suspect that they were pretty close in tone and content. Both media-serials were originally directed at a kid-audience that tended to want maximum excitement, with lots of flashy sci-fi concepts. 

Most reviews take issue with some of the advertising for this 1992 production, apparently touting the movie's kinetic action sequences. It's true that EIGHT MAN doesn't have many strong battle-scenes. But I liked the way the movie saw the cyborg-superhero through a film noir lens, just as the contemporaneous Tim Burton Bat-films did. It might not be stunningly original, but it has some honest emotion in its melodramatic story-- hence its noir-ish Japanese subtitle, "For All the Lonely Nights."

Sometime in the past, a cop named Yokoda was killed in the line of duty. His superior officer somehow commandeered the body and took it to his scientist friend Doctor Tani (Jo Shishido). Tani happened to be working on a project involving a super-powered robot, dubbed Eight Man, and the scientist downloaded Yokoda's mind into the robot. The result is a mechanical man-- not really a true cyborg despite the advertising-- with human intelligence and emotions, even if Eight Man doesn't precisely remember his old life.'

Unlike the anime hero, who was constantly encountering supercriminals with names like "Doctor Spectra," Eight Man seems to have been used to fight street-level crooks like drug dealers. He assumes a human identity, private detective Azuma (Kai Shishido, son of the actor playing the scientist). Not only does the detective work intermittently with Yokoda's old police-partner, Azuma also engages a secretary who just happens to be Sachiko, the former girlfriend of deceased Yokoda.

While Azuma deals with recrudescent memories of his former humanity, he gets an "opposite number" type of villain in Ken (Osamu Ohtomo). Before creating Eight Man, Tani had another working model. His real-life son Ken, a hellraiser-type, killed himself in a car-crash, so Tani transplanted Ken's brain into "Seven Man." Unfortunately, Ken became unstable, and he hates being a human robot so much that he starts killing people. 

I fully admit that, even though Ken and Eight Man have some spiffy powers, they don't have a big super-fight toward the end. But then, the climactic battle of the two BLADE RUNNER opponents succeeds less by overblown kinetics than by emotional tone. The fact that these foes are "brothers" by virtue of their shared history-- even though one is a stone killer and the other is comparatively sane-- makes EIGHT MAN a solid melodrama. Oh, and the Eight Man costume makes Shishido one of the better-looking live-action superheroes of nineties cinema.