2 out of 5

Directed by: Shigeaki Kubo

Trying to separate my manga / anime fandom for Golden Kamuy, while the live action film nails something very important – I loved the casting for Sugimoto and Asirpa – I feel like it falls flat on a lot of base metrics as a movie, and then if I bring my fandom back in, the flick misses on the mark in some regards there as well. While GK absolutely gets wildly outlandish later on, its opening chapters have enough grounding (and wonderful historical flourish) to have worked incredibly well in this format, and – as we often see with live action adaptaptions of any medium – I think the translation gets lost in the juggle between finding a proper style and giving the followers what they “want,” which is often determined to be shot-for-shot remakes of various scenes, and dialogue quotes.

At a high level – which is about as far as we get in this movie, covering almost the first half of the show’s first season / about two tankobon‘s worth of material – Golden Kamuy is about a treasure hunt. Post the Russo-Japanese war of the early 1900s, dejected veteran Saichi Sugimoto (Kento Yamazaki) overhears a story about a nice stack of gold procured and buried by the indigenous Japanese Ainu population that has since been secreted away through a messy series of incarceration, escape, and murder. The key to finding that gold is a set of map pieces, and Sugimoto – nicknamed the immortal Sugimoto – has stumbled across one, about the same time as a young Ainu girl named Asirpa (Anna Yamada); they agree to find the gold together.

Unfortunately… they’re not the only ones following this thread: other Japanese soldiers led by the eccentric Tsurimi (Hiroshi Tamaki) are in the mix, as is a growing band of brawlers / samurai led by Hijikata (Hiroshi Tachi), in addition to some of the in-the-know escaped prisoners getting involved, such as the slippery Shiraishi (Yûma Yamoto). There are other characters stuffed in there who will become more important later, but for now, exist as glorified slo-mo cameos. More on that in a moment.

At other levels, Golden Kamuy is / can be about many things, as a study of relative morality, and the effects of war, and a cultural study, constantly pitting (at this point) Asirpa’s Ainu lifestyle non-adversarialy against Sugimoto’s Japanese lifestyle; but we’re reduced to just the gloss on the first two, and some minimal expositions dump for character development. The latter bit is very fun and is well effected, but it kind of sticks out, stylistically / tonally – handled in a boppy soundbyte fashion – versus the morass of the other drama and action.

I’m using “morass” in a couple of senses: the camerawork on this goes for a lot of faux-oners, and flips 180s on us a bit too often, resulting in scenes that feel energized, but don’t actually visually flow very well, alongside the tired orange / blue muted color scheme. But I’d also use morass to suggest a general… slowness. Slo-mo is used way too often but ineffectively, going for glory shots where it’s not always clear what the focus is, further muddied by lighting that has a similar questionable purpose (e.g. a scene where moonlight is supposed to indicate a target being highlighted, but there’s no real dramatic change for the viewer), and music that confusingly uses electronic stings with a horror-movie undertone in a film that’s mostly upbeat and a mismatch for modern instrumentation. A lot of these scenes are almost there, but the creators were just too eager to recreate panel A or scene B, and had no filter for how much of that they wanted to do, leading to the movie slowing down practically every five minutes without much impact, even setting aside the overkill.

This doesn’t mean nothing works, as the actual plot is engaging (if ineffectively related), and the buddy buddy scenes with Sugimoto and Asirpa are charming as heck; as mentioned, Yamazaki and Yamada are truly excellent, and production struck a good balance with their anime / manga likenesses and “reality.”

To flip back to some criticisms, though, the lest of the cast is harder to pin down. Tamaki is a fun villain, but there’s a lot of time dedicated to setup before we get to his character, preventing there from being enough time to really get into his screen presence. And while I believe Yamoto is a known comedy quality – Shiraishi is a bonkers character – the timing of his scenes always felt off, like he wasn’t actually performing with his fellow actors, and rather just mugging for the camera.

I recognize, even with best intentions to view this as its own thing, a Golden Kamuy fan is going to be a tough sell on this. While I would like to think I’m able to separate the media forms, we’ll allow I have my biases. But even looking at this technically, and how it was directed and acted, it’s a pretty clunky film, and I think may’ve actually held my attention more because of my fandom, not despite it.