Director – Takashi Miike, Screenplay – Kurio Kisaragi, Based on the Novel by Kozy Watanabe, Producers – Kazuya Hamana, Takashi Hirano, Makoto Nakanishi, Toshiaki Nakazawa & Yasuhiro Mase, Photography – Hideo Yamamoto, Music – Koji Endo, Production Design – Akira Ishige. Production Company – TBS/Toy’s Factory/Sedic International/Avex Group/Excellent Film.
High school teenager Mai Hitomi is attracted to fellow pupil Yu and they share their first kiss beneath a cherry blossom tree on the beach. On the way home, Mai is run down by a truck and killed. However, her father is a cyberneticist who has backed up a copy of Mai’s memory on cd. He now loads the copy of Mai onto the computer where it forms into an A.I. personality that calls itself Ai. Ai contacts Yu and he loads her onto a laptop so that he can take her to meet their mutual friends. However, Satoshi Takanaka, a genius cyberneticist at M.I.T., and others seek the Ai program and Yu is forced to flee with the laptop to protect Ai.
Japan’s Takashi Miike has become regarded as a cult director. Miike made a name for himself in the early 2000s with films like Audition (1999), Ichi the Killer (2001) and Visitor Q (2001) that were celebrated by audiences because of the ultra-violent and taboo-defying extremes he pushed the material. Miike has been prolific since the early 1990s, putting out 3-4 films per year, sometimes twice that, although this seems to have slowed down after 2020.
Andromedia was made early in Takashi Miike’s career ie. before his name started to explode out onto the international stage in a big way the following year with Audition. That said, at this point Miike had made 24 other films since his debut in 1991 (more than some directors make in a career spanning decades), most of which were in the popular yakuza or high school/juvenile delinquent genres. Andromedia does make interesting contrast to Miike’s one previous genre film Full Metal Yakuza (1997) in which a lowly Yakuza peon is rebuilt in a cyborg body – both films could almost act as mirror opposites of the other.
With Andromedia, Miike adapts a light novel intended for the teenage market. The film is a blatant pitch on Miike’s part for something more commercial – the Japanese equivalent of the Young Adult market. Andromedia predates the theme of Mind Upload that became popular on screens in the 2010s and beyond in films like Transcendence (2014), Archive (2020) and the tv series Caprica (2009-10).
Hiroko Shimabukuro as the uploaded Ai
Takashi Miike has never been a director much concerned with plot and Andromedia never quite engages as a story. It’s a teen romance of sorts – just one where the girl happens to be a A.I.. This involves assorted complications and running around, none of which Miike does much to compound for anything like tension or dramatic twists. Everything arrives at a very sentimental ending.
By the very market he is making Andromedia for, Miike is forced to cut back on his trademark violence, outrages or the ventures off into eccentricity that dominate his films from the 2000s and beyond. There is one very silly sequence that Miike indulges that presages his work of the late 2000s, a point when he frequently ceased to give any fucks about whether his films make sense or not – the slapstick car chase sequence where the teenagers in the car suddenly heat up and then begin to freeze, all as bad guy Christopher Doyle (a rare acting appearance from Doyle, who is otherwise a renowned cinematographer, frequently working with Wong Kar-wai) seems to be playing the scene with a videogame controller. Aside from that, the rest of the film is directed in a bland, colourless and flat visual style.
Looking back at it from 2024, Andromedia feels very dated. What made me laugh was seeing that the entirety of Mai’s memory was backed up on three cd-roms. In 1998, the maximum capacity of a cd-rom was 700 megabytes. This means that the entirety of Mai’s personality is encoded in two gigabytes, which was less than the entire size of the film on the dvd of Andromedia I was watching. The depiction of cyberspace looks very dated today, like something was making a low-budget copy of Tron (1982) conducted without much money for visuals and animation.
Takashi Miike’s other genre films are:– Full Metal Yakuza (1997), a yakuza/cyborg film; The Bird People in China (1998) about the discovery of a lost culture; Audition (1999); the Yakuza film Dead or Alive (1999), which comes with a gonzo sf ending; the surreal Dead or Alive 2 – Birds (2000); the six-hour tv mini-series MPD Psycho (2000) about a split-personalitied cop tracking body-hopping terrorists; the surreal black comedy The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001); Ichi the Killer (2001), a Yakuza film with some extreme torture scenes; the controversial taboo-defying Visitor Q (2001) about a mysterious visitor; the Cyberpunk future-set Dead or Alive: Final (2002); the surreal Yakuza film Gozu (2003); One Missed Call (2003) about ghostly cellphone calls; the ultra-violent Izo (2004) about a cursed, immortal samurai; an episode of the horror anthology Three … Extremes (2004); the superhero film Zebraman (2004); the fairytale Demon Pond (2005); the supernatural fantasy epic The Great Yokai War (2005); Big Bang Love, Juvenile A (2006), a prison murder mystery with SF elements; the SF film God’s Puzzle (2008); YatterMan (2009), a gonzo live-action remake of a superpowered anime tv series; Zebraman 2: Attack on Zebra City (2010); the videogame adaptation Ace Attorney (2012); Lesson of the Evil (2012) about a murderous high school teacher; As the Gods Will (2014) with high school students being slaughtered by a doll; Over Your Dead Body (2014) wherein the roles in a ghost story play come to replay themselves in the lives of the actors; the gonzo horror film Yakuza Apocalypse (2015); Terra Formars (2016) about giant mutated cockroaches on Mars; Blade of the Immortal (2017) about an immortal samurai; the manga adaptation JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable – Chapter 1 (2017); Laplace’s Witch (2018); The Great Yokai War: Guardians (2021); and Lumberjack the Monster (2023).
