Big Bang Love, Juvenile A (2006) - Takashi Miike

In an unknown futuristic world,  Takashi Miike's Big Bang Love takes place at a juvenile detention center.  A young boy, who is being contained at the facility, confesses to the murder of another, setting off a chain of events.  The film follows two detectives who try desperately to uncover the truth behind the case.  Big Bang Love is a film that is decisive in it's decision to focus much more on stylistic story-telling than narrative.  The plot is really consequential to the bigger themes of the film, touching on homosexual tension and violence which drive the narrative, or semblance of one, forward.   It is a film that questions the motives of men in our world and the reason for such violence which seems to plague all of mankind. Miike's Big Bang Love is a visually fascinating expressionistic nightmare of a film, with some breathtaking visuals that are both strange and poignant, at times.  The film touches on many philosophical issues like the identity of masculinity in out society, homosexuality, violence, heaven and hell, and even the notion of how we are all related to space and time.  This is definitely a film that is more about the experience than anything, being very vivid, but as one can probably imagine it is far too overstuffed with ideas, to the point that I had trouble even remembering everything the film was attempting to say.  The main problem I had with this approach is that most of these themes or issues which the film chooses to explore, are not nearly fleshed out enough, making the analysis somewhat incomplete or just not as deep as i was hoping.  Quite frankly, The imagery alone warrants a viewing, but this is a film that fails to reach its lofty goals. 

6.5/10

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