Review: Dororo

Summary
Alternative Title: どろろ
Genre: Action, adventure
Release Date: Jan. 27, 2007
Starring:

• Shibasaki Kou as Dororo
• Tsumabuki Satoshi as Hyakkimaru

After losing a battle, a desperate feudal lord makes a pact with demons, offering his son’s body in exchange for the ability to rule the world. When the son is born, being an immortal and barely human, he is abandoned by his parents. Many years later, that same son, now named Hyakki-maru, is on a mission to kill the demons that took away his human body. After fighting one of the demons, he meets a thief named Dororo.

Review
As some of you may have guessed, I’m a hug fan of historical/quasi-historical J-movies. I’ve seen several of them so far, but none of them disappointed me greatly. All of the historical J-movies I’ve reviewed so far had something I liked. But that was before I watched Dororo. I had high expectations after watching the awesome trailer, but it turned out to be the worst historical J-movie I’ve ever watched.

This is the first J-movie that I’ve watched with a lead male role played by women. I thought it would be interesting to see actress Shibasaki Kou play a boy, but it wasn’t. I thought Shibasaki tries way too hard to act like a boy. She forces her voice lower, slants her eyebrows and always tries to look tough throughout the entire movie. The result is a extremely annoying character that makes the movie almost unwatchable. Another huge miss is the CGI used to create the monsters. Saying that the CGI was terrible would be an understatement. They were sooo terrible even the first Starwars movie had better CGI and it was made more than 30 years ago. CGI was unrealistic (some even looked 2-D) and some of the monster movements were choppy.

It wasn’t only the CGI that was bad, all the special affect were terrible. In one scene, they even used someone dressed in a monster costume and it looked like one of those monsters from Power Rangers. This scene probably had the worst special effects of the whole movie, since they tried to make the monster seem gigantic but it was obviously just the size of a human.

The only major thing that I liked about Dororo was how it remained gritty and dark throughout the whole movie. The colours are very dark and some effects were used to add to the dark feel. I noticed that for one scene they made the picture look a bit grainy which fitted well with what was going on in the scene. However, this didn’t do much to make the overall movie more enjoyable.


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Pros

• Maintains a dark/gritty look throughout the whole movie
• Last fight scene was decent

Cons

• Shibasaki tires too hard to act like a boy, making her character very annoying
• Special effects were TERRIBLE!
• Every other fight scene was mediocre
• Minor characters get too much attention
• Story was unoriginal
• Music was annoying at times

Recommendation
Stay away from this one at all costs!!!(>_<)

Rating: 3/10

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