DVD Review: Minoru Kawasaki's THE WORLD SINKS EXCEPT JAPAN
It's the year 2011. Massive earthquakes cause the United States to sink into the ocean. The president escapes as do millions of other U.S. citizens. Some fly to China while others find refuge in Russia. Millions find their way to Japan who, as an U.S. ally, feels obligated to assist. As the world crisis worsens, continent after continent sinks until Japan becomes the last land mass on Earth. This is the world presented in Minoru Kawasaki's The World Sinks Except Japan (Nihon igai zenbu chinbotsu), which is now available on English-subtitled DVD from Synapse Films. Kawasaki's film is a disaster satire that explores some interesting ideas with varying degrees of success.
The World Sinks Except Japan, which is based on a short story by Yasutaka Tsutsui, uses a disaster scenario to comment on topics such jingoism and immigration. Although the people of many nations come to depend on Japan for their existence, it is the Americans who are the source of the film's main idea: how might a culture such as Japan deal with a sudden influx of millions of American refugees? The execution of this idea leaves one wanting.
The production style embraces elements of old-school disaster films such as cool miniature effects, international casting and multilingual dialogue. The handling of the acting and dialogue is, however, one of the film's sticking points. For example, a prominent female character who is presented as being from Texas speaks Japanese to her husband but when she speaks English, she does so with a pronounced Eastern European accent. Is this inconsistency intentional or an incident of other limitations? Does it matter? It does matter because these issues are related to the film's main problem: its humor. It is sometimes difficult to tell when the humor is intentional. When the comedy is obvious, the jokes tend to fall flat because of their reliance on Team America style stereotypes and flat celebrity parodies. This broad humor seems especially weak when compared to the film's sharper commentary (e.g., a televised "foreigner report" that, like a weather report, tracks the misdeeds of foreigners throughout Japan).
Synapse's DVD presentation is, as usual, exceptional. Special features presented include a "making of" segment, theatrical trailer, the full-length version of a kaiju parody featured in the film, introductions by the director and cast, and director's audio commentary. The World Sinks Except Japan boasts many great moments but overall, the film is widely uneven and the humor tends to be a drag.
