For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

It's funny watching the elements come together in this complicated scam. On one hand, the set-up isn't quite as complex as it seems, but there's an easy sense of fun in every exchange.

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

I study long form film to see how it works. Some times what I end up seeing doesn't work. That is the case here; only the costumes matter, and one episode has resonance. Does that one episode qualify this as long form? Maybe. Long form has less to do with length than whether things evolve and the film has some chance of helping the viewer evolve. The outer wrapper of this is a dreary ten minute initial narration that gives us completely irrelevant history. An inner wrapper that constitutes most of the hour has three young women (hardly girls) and a scruffy guy "playing" a virtual reality game. This is as much a waste. We never exit the game but we sometimes 'pause play.'But smack in the middle is an odd sequence. Twice earlier we have a well photographed closeup of a snail. One of our 'girls' puts it on the head of a small weathered statue of a wizened it young traveler. It is a very Katachi action. She and us study, admire and move on. In turn, each of the other three encounter it and we are supposed to get key aspects of their person from this. We don't, so that is a waste too. But that initial encounter evokes a deep inner narrative I have about some facet of Japanese spirituality and form, sex and striving in general and within my private shell what urgent peace is all about. All the hard work was done by me, based on what boils down to one moving image. Would I call this long form? It had the effect of long form, but there was essentially no dialog between me and the artists. In the midst of all the provocative narratives I had spinning within me (whether to fight, whether to seek grace), was one about other filmmakers and who I wish was my companion here. Fruit Chan. His Public Toilet goes on and on, using lives I could not care about, folded casually. But at the end, oh what resurrection of everything that went before. That one scene connected with all else, in the film and without. Mastery. Now that's long form.

This is a bad movie. Honestly this movie is a big waste of time and not in a good way. Its slow, its boring and its pointless.The starting 8minutes is someone Japanese guy narrating, in English, some pseudo psychology about humanity and war and how people escape into the virtual world for their excitement and of course killing. The guy drones on with only still images on screen.Then the movie starts and this is where I give the movie major points, the CG is very very well done. amongst the best I have seen thus far in regards to flow, texture etc. (otherwise I would've given this movie a 1).The Characters...lets just say there is no character development. You only see the characters (avatars) as they are in the virtual world. One of the characters, Lucifer (crow girl) seems to be there only to fill up space. No idea why she seemingly dances (badly) for no reason. Hard to believe that she is actually an Oscar nominated actress.The plot is they are going to kill some giant worms for points. Thats it. Like I said some of the shots are very well done, CG and live landscape shots. But pointless and slow, a lot of just walking around. I mean at least half the movie is walking around aimlessly with landscape shots and shots of a snail.For those of you old enough to remember video games (before CG really took off circa early-mid 90s) where the cut scenes were real actors (wing commander, privateer etc), this movie is like that.Waste of time. watch it for the CG and some nice landscape shots but have your remote handy to fast forward the movie.

Mamoru Oshii's latest film is a supposedly linked to his film in the portmanteau film called Kill. It is also a second go round in the world of Avalon, which is the name of one of his other live action films. The earlier film deals with a woman who is paid to play in an online game set in a world called Avalon. The earlier film is a very good looking film but one that people either lover of hate.Assault Girls is a film that I think most people are going to hate. The film begins with a very dense very complicated narrated sequence that sets up everything and explains a new version of Avalon. Its a sequence that is so long and so rambling that I ended up checking how much time elapsed on the DVD, eight minutes and it was still going.Once Oshii gets all of the words out the way the film descends into the excesses of the earlier film which are these beautiful but almost silent sequences that seem to have been designed to look good but don't really work outside of that. Yea things like the giant worm gotcha bit that immediately follows the narration is nice but it takes too long to get to the punchline.Give the film points for looking good and very much like anime come to life, but strip away even more for technical gaffes like having all of the battlefield dialog spoken into masks which makes understanding what is ever is said near impossible. The fact that this Japanese film was made in English with actors who don't speak the language well enough doesn't help either.(yes they speak fine when unmasked, but with the masks its a almost unintelligible.) Worse is the pacing. Outside of the early worm hunts not a whole heck of a lot happens until the end. This is not real life reflected back at us, this is four characters walking across a blank landscape. Yea there is some action at the end but I'm guessing that most people who have the film play out to the end credits only had it do so because they fell asleep on the film and were woken up by the loud music that plays with the credits.Give the film 10 points for the look. Take away about twenty five for the boredom.

By spoilers, I mean more by way of telling what this movie is not as opposed to what happens in it. I would really not call this a movie per se but more of an experiment in existential nihilism. The entire proceedings are not really explained - you are just thrust into this VR world and see a few player avatars killing giant sand worms a la Dune (or Vexille's Jags). As said, if you watched this expecting a movie which has a start/ middle/ and end and a plot which makes sense, you will be disappointed. If you are someone who likes experimental cinema and is willing to go for the ride, however bizarre and truncated it may be, you will be less disappointed. If you are the former and appreciate anime and video games, and Japanese cinema and culture in general then you will probably find it an interesting watch, even if it is ultimately without true context or meaning in a traditional sense. Slight shades of Final Fantasy and ICO can be seen, as well as perhaps a very roundabout homage to TRON and a more obvious reference to Mortal Kombat or its ilk. So while not really a movie in the traditional sense, it is nonetheless interesting enough to watch.