Browse: Home / SIFF Dispatches: MEATBALL MACHINE KODOKU

Menu

Skip to content
  • Home
  • Who We Are
  • About
  • Privacy
  • Contact Us
  • Login

The-SoluteLogo

A Film Site By Lovers of Film

Menu

Skip to content
  • Features
  • Reviews
  • Long Reviews
  • News
  • Articles and Opinions
  • Other Media
  • Attention Must Be Paid: Hank Worden
  • Disney Byways: "Donald's Golf Game"
  • The Solute Book Club: MILKMAN Discussion (by Essie)
  • The Friday Article Roundup: For All You Sexy Beasts
  • The very late and half-assed end-of-year TV writeup for 2021

SIFF Dispatches: MEATBALL MACHINE KODOKU

Posted By Julius Kassendorf on July 6, 2017 in Reviews | 204 Responses

Rat Race, Game of Life, fighting for survival – so many phrases associated with living have to do with competition and individualism rather than collaboration and togetherness. In a rampant capitalistic society, we’re all fighting for our own survival, but its only through socialistic means that we can actually achieve success. At least that seems to be the theory of the new ultraviolent Japanese video-game-inspired film Meatball Machine Kodoku. Inspired by Mortal Kombat tournament competitions, Meatball Machine Kodoku wonders whether the capitalist rat race turns us all into product for an overarching corporate culture.

The trailer for Meatball Machine Kodoku sells the film as a gonzo gore-filled melee of crazy non-stop violence between cyberpunk robot-mutated cyborgs. And, yes, it totally gets there eventually. But, it spends the first 40 minutes on a mundane Japanese melodrama about a sad-sack down-on-his-luck debt collector who tries to squeeze blood from a series of stones. The debt collector is beset on all sides by needy mouthes to fill, including his own, his mothers, his landlords, and his medical bills because he has cancer. To make money, he has to collect from other people in his same scenario, and those people don’t necessarily have money either. Along the way, he falls in love with a younger single mother who isn’t exactly well off. We spend 40 minutes going through this rote drama as a series of strange characters in tall hats outline a new street line through the city.

Suddenly, a giant plastic cylinder drops upon the city and a group of tiny aliens invade select citizens within the water cooler, and turn them into mutant cyborg fighting machines, each with their own special ability based on their real life obsessions. Much like capitalism turns us into tools for enriching an elite upper class, these aliens use these humans as virtual gaming devices to mindlessly fight each other in a deadly tournament to fight their way to bloody victory. As each robot defeats another robot, they collect the power from that previous enemy and use it to power up and learn new moves. The cancer in the debt collector prevents the robots from fully taking advantage of his body and he is left to fend for himself in a winner take all tournament of machine gun breasts and fountains of blood.

With a running time of 100 minutes, Meatball Machine Kotoku wears out its welcome long before it violently grinds to a halt. Other than the spectacle of watching the melodrama and the spectacle of watching manbots fighting, not much in Kotoku expands beyond its simple fighting game presence. With the exception of a sledgehammer punchline so bizarro you won’t see it coming, the remainder of the movie is straight up what it promises: robo-people fighting an escalating series of bloody gory crazy cyberpunky battles without the pesky problems of plot. Whether this is enough to sustain your attention will immensely depend on your attention span.

Yeah, because this is Japanese gonzo, this is pretty misogynistic with sexual assault (really?!) and plenty of bare breasts. The men treat women as objects and trophies, and it doesn’t have American feminist sexual politics on its mind. Instead, Meatball Machine Kotoku focuses exclusively on the specter of capitalism and the damage it does to the body and the soul, and that is only done in the most oblique manner. The metaphor is fun to think about in hindsight, but the experience, for me, is pretty grating and redundant. Your Mileage WILL Vary.

Posted in Reviews | Tagged Action, Capitalism, Comedy, Cyberpunk, Foreign, Foreign Language, Horror, Japan, Meatball Machine Kotoku, Science Fiction, Seattle International Film Festival, SIFF, Yoshihiro Nishimura

About the Author

Julius Kassendorf

Julius Kassendorf is the founder of The-Solute, and previously founded The Other FIlms and Project Runaways in 2013. There, he dabbled in form within reviews to better textualize thought processes about the medium of film.

Previously, he has blogged at other, now-defunct, websites that you probably haven’t heard of, and had a boyfriend in Canada for many years. Julius resides in Seattle, where he enjoys the full life of the Seattle Film Community.

Julius’ commanding rule about film: Don’t Be Common. He believes the worst thing in the world is for a film to be like every other film, with a secondary crime of being a film with little to no ambition.

Related Posts

Decade of the Month: Tom “vomas” Morton on GO WEST→

Decade of the Month: Sunil Patel on SHERLOCK, JR.→

Lang the Mythmaker: METROPOLIS, Part 2→

Lang vs. Von Harbou: James Williams on METROPOLIS→

  • Comments
  • Popular
  • Most Recent
  • j*****@yahoo.com'
    mr_apollo on Year of the Month: Mon OncleWonderful piece, Sam. It's made…
  • j*****@yahoo.com'
    mr_apollo on Year of the Month: Mon OncleFellow heretic here. I've never…
  • n***********@gmail.com'
    Ruck Cohlchez on Film on the Internet: AN AMERICAN CRIMEI wouldn't have called it…
  • j***********@gmail.com'
    Son of Griff on LIFE ITSELFGlad to hear back from…
  • n*********@gmail.com'
    Jake Gittes on Film on the Internet: AN AMERICAN CRIMEThis is the single most…
  • “The End” of SAVAGES

    30718 views / Posted November 10, 2014
  • What the fuck did I just watch? SPHERE

    26432 views / Posted March 19, 2015
  • Scenic Routes: SHOWGIRLS (1995)

    18917 views / Posted November 20, 2014
  • The Untalented Mr. Ripley: The Craft of Standup Comedy and the Non-Comedy of TOM MYERS

    17710 views / Posted June 26, 2018
  • Yvonne, or: CASABLANCA In One Character and Three Scenes

    9574 views / Posted August 21, 2014
  • An interesting final role, at least

    Attention Must Be Paid: Hank Worden

    May 28, 2022 / Gillianren
  • One bird yells at another

    Disney Byways: “Donald’s Golf Game”

    May 27, 2022 / Gillianren
  • The Troubles did not do a body good.

    The Solute Book Club: MILKMAN Discussion (by Essie)

    May 27, 2022 / The Ploughman
  • ...or at least Beasts.

    The Friday Article Roundup: For All You Sexy Beasts

    May 27, 2022 / The Ploughman
  • The very late and half-assed end-of-year TV writeup for 2021

    May 26, 2022 / Ruck Cohlchez

Last Tweets

  • Attention Must Be Paid: Hank Worden - https://t.co/Kkahne4RwM, 15 hours ago
  • Disney Byways: “Donald’s Golf Game” - https://t.co/LkKoHd9WiO, May 28
  • THE SOLUTE BOOK CLUB: Join today's discussion on MILKMAN by Anna Burns: https://t.co/MYRnuYJELB, May 27

©2014 - 2016 The-Solute | Hosted, Developed and Maintained by Bellingham WP LogoBellinghamWP.com.

Menu

  • Home
  • Who We Are
  • About
  • Privacy
  • Contact Us
  • Login
Do NOT follow this link or you will be banned from the site!