Blister! review

This is the kind of film that seems like a slam dunk marketing-wise. It’s basically a film made by geeks, for geeks, about geeks. That’s the geek triple threat right there. That’s why it was fairly shocking to me, a geek in fairly good standing, that I had never actually heard about it until very recently. You can understand my dismay as a reformed action figure connoisseur and huge fan of Asian cinema when I discovered that not only was there a Japanese film based on obsessive action figure collecting, but it’s been out since 2000. I knew I had to investigate immediately.

Yuji (Hideaki Ito) is a serious collector of American action figures. In fact it’s really the only thing he ever thinks about or puts in any effort into. He won’t even take them out of the original blister packs they’re packaged in. His main obsession is a toy named Hellbanker and as far as he knows there is only one in existence. Because of that, trying to find a way to get his hands on it consumes his every waking moment, much to the chagrin of his girlfriend, Mami (Masumi Sanada). Yuji associates mostly with other collectors but they don’t all collect action figures. There’s Terada (Akio Otsuka); the science fiction geek, Hasamoto (Yuta Yamazaki); the robot otaku, and Kimura; a braggart who collects anything rare and has an unfriendly competition going with Yuji to find Hellbanker first.

This sheltered world of theirs seems to work out fine at first but after a while their obsessions each gradually spiral out of control in different ways. Yuji becomes consumed with Hellbanker to the point where he’s driving his girlfriend away, Terada’s sci-fi obsession gets him in way over his head financially, Hasamoto questions his own artistic merit when a girl he likes gets offended and confused by his work, and as far as Kimura; well, he’s just plain old psychotic. The film tries to keep each otaku’s storyline relatively separate for the most part but in doing so the questions being brought up by each of their situations tend to convey messages that directly conflict with the others. For instance, while one character’s creative dream is made to seem misguided and overzealous the film later touts the value of creativity for the other characters. I guess the lesson here is you should be creative as long as you don’t suck at it? On the other hand Hasamoto’s problem is just completely ignored as if it was never a problem to begin with. It makes you wonder if the writer just totally forgot about him or didn’t know where to take it, given all the pro-creativity diatribes given toward the end. After all, he’s probably the only one out of them all with any real talent and he has no obsession with collecting things. Other than giving some sage advice to Yuji his whole purpose was pretty muddled because they never resolved his issues.

To confuse matters further throughout the film they keep flashing ahead to some sort of Mad Max-like post-apocalyptic future where the world has stopped spinning and for some reason the key to fix everything is the Hellbanker figure. At first I thought it was just a daydream of one of the characters or something, but disappointingly they never give any indication that it’s not completely real. It seems completely unnecessary and out of place. All the futile attempts to link that future storyline to the present day just come off a little convoluted and insipid. Not to mention the fact that it completely legitimizes the importance of the Hellbanker figure, a weird decision that theoretically validates Yuji’s obsession instead of condemning it as trivial.

For the most part “Blister!” is actually a really enjoyable film with an occasionally-innovative shooting style, interesting characters, above average acting performances, and a pace that never lets it get stagnant. Even so, the makers of this film had an opportunity to make this a funny and poignant story about otaku obsession but instead got distracted by excessive exuberance and seemingly whiffed on their original intention because of it. Maybe if they had paid more attention to their own message they could have avoided that, but I guess it was too cryptic even for them.

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Availability: Record Hanbaimo released a limited quantity, low-priced DVD of "Blister!" with English-subtitles on September 15, 2004. Check here for full specs.

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