entertainment

'Terra Formars' live-action movie in the works; Takashi Miike to direct

7 Comments
By RocketNews24

This week’s Young Jump magazine is expected to announce the plans for a live-action film based on the hit sci-fi manga "Terra Formars."

Although details are scant at the moment, the one juicy tidbit is that Takashi Miike has signed on.

The "Terra Formars" manga began in 2011 and follows the aftermath of an attempt by Earth to colonize Mars by sending up algae spreading cockroaches to produce a livable environment for humans. However, the cockroaches end up evolving into killer humanoid creatures which kind of put a cramp on us living there.

After getting wiped out the first time, Earthlings begin to send out teams of fighters enhanced with insect-like powers to exterminate the cockroaches and reclaim Mars for themselves. Much like real-life encounters with cockroaches the battles tend to be violent and messy affairs.

And so, it’s with good reason that Miike was sought out the helm this project. He’s never been one to show restraint when it comes to on-screen violence so we shouldn’t expect any fake blood or guts to be spared during production. It’s also said that he’s a Starship Troopers fan so hopefully we’ll see something along those lines.

On the other hand, Japanese readers of the news were extremely quick to point out that live-action adaptations of manga and anime tend to suck.

“Boring.” “It’ll never get off the ground.” “They won’t be able to show anything with all the censorship. It’ll just be a black screen.” “Why do they always have to try a live-action version?” “It’s sure to be a crap-action movie.” "You should never go beyond two dimensions.” “Have they ever made a good live-action manga movie?” “Devilman was better than I thought it would be.” “I’m fine with the manga, thanks.”

They raise a good argument but it’s all just speculation at this point. I’m holding out faith that Miike won’t pull any punches. We’ll just have to wait as Young Jump tickles our collective butts with the feather of more details in each issue as production gets underway.

Source: Anime News Network

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7 Comments
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A student of mine brought a few of these in to check out and it looks like what a young teen boy would be in to. (Lots of fighting/violence and special powers). Very similar niche as Shingeki no Kyojin or Dragonball I'd say.... but the premise and storyline is overly overly ridiculous. I didn't get too far into it before I got lost in the details/plot holes.

I guess I can accept a lot of fantasy in ...well.. fantasy genre, but in SF I expect a little bit more realistic thinking, especially if the setting is a real place (Earth and/or Mars).

As basically stated above, the gist is: Man made monsters over run mars. Rather than using all our conventional knowledge of war (use ranged, drones, airplanes etc), we genetically alter humans and send them in to brawl... My biggest gripe was the artificial weaknesses: to use their fighting powers they have to take a special (and extremely limited!???) medicine.

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I feel kind of bad for Miike as those commenters don't seem to know who he is, he's done a ton of very gory violent movies like half of his movies are over the top violent yakuza movies I don't think they need to worry about the censorship. Plus there has been a ton of great manga live action adaptations (Including probably the best Japanese film series ever Lone Wolf and Cub!) If you're a fan of the manga you should be super happy about this because Miike is a AAA director by any standard

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The YatterMan movie was done pretty well I think, that was done by Miike, so I have some hope for this

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@lostrune2Feb. 10, 2015 - 05:23PM JST Where are they gonna find enough black buffs to play the cockroaches?

Simple, CGI. Same as hobbit's battle of 5 armies.

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I'll pass on this. I stopped watching the anime because it was pretty rubbish. Only two episodes I saw were censored, but that's not why I dropped it. I stopped watching because they spent so much time exploring the characters' pasts that I forgot what the point of the story was. There were about 5 or 6 episodes in a row that were just back story. Character development is important, but not all at once like that, and not for the majority of each episode. If Miike can avoid that mistake, then maybe I'll watch it, but I make no promises. Thing is though, a war on bugs has already been done. Starship Troopers. True, the story's different this time around, but when you get down to the bare bones, it's just people fighting giant bugs all over again.

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@lostrune2 - those are some buff roaches lol

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