Steeped in dark, stylistic beauty, "Blood" rushes through its storyboard. As a consequence,
potentially poignant thematic points splash from its broad-stroke plot like sloppy slivers of
paint on a canvas, becoming mere afterthoughts instead of narrative punctuation. Its sheer brutal
force and vigorous pacing, though, keeps this vampire fable very much alive.
Its "senselessness of war" conceit jars the most, a glue-gunned poetic addition that essentially
impairs Saya's character arc from reaching a satisfying conclusion.
Other than exposing the baseness of mankind as a counterpoint to the barbarism of the monsters, very
little else justifies using war as a resonant theme. The military angle plays harmoniously into
Saya's controlled, personal discipline. However, her ambiguous pupil/colleague/friend relationship
with government contact David overshadows her lone soldier attitude. So, essentially by saying that
violently ripping into the flesh of netherworld minions is bad, "Blood" asserts that the violence of
war - a bitter reality in a globe on the verge of conflict - is also bad. In making this extraneous
point, director Hiroyuki Kitakubo marginalizes Saya's drive, ambition and ultimate enlightenment.
Visually though, dark foreboding planes and cold, sterile textures of militarily efficient architecture
tincture "Blood's" tone with an unsettling mixture of hope and hopelessness. It suggests potential
vessels of kinetic anger poised to unleash a kind of scourge on the world that, once unbound, will
never lay to rest. While in iconic contrast, the unflappable, un-dead exterminator, pigtailed,
uniformed and wielding a lethal blade, hides untapped rage behind hardened brown eyes. It's as if she
understands the fruitlessness of her task - as if she understands that humanity itself is as much, if
not more of, a scourge.
Not that Kitakubo, working with a script by Kenji Kamiyama, indulges his loaded images to the neglect
of more germane themes. Deliberate understatements of an unwelcome American presence in Japan and
uncomfortably accurate depictions of the psychological scars inflicted by human terror lend substance to
Kitakubo's visual effulgence. But a slap-dash, frenetic race through the narrative serves up the
action-packed Cliff Notes version of what could have been an evocative tale. Wrestling with her
identity, Saya faces killing her own kind to save beings who are killing their own kind.
These lip-served themes, ironically, compel the most. The residue of anti-Asian prejudice left in
the children of Japanese-American work camp supporters mixed with a Japanese disdain for a military
that once dropped the deadliest weapon ever created on their heads laces Saya's behavior at the high
school. While touching, these themes also provoke questions than neither Kitakubo nor Kamiyama
attempt to answer, undermining a Japanese propensity toward philosophical rhetoric with a feebly cohesive
script. But perhaps most thematically potent, and regrettably drowned out by the final image's flock of
transport ships, is Saya's sad introspective gesture over the quivering body of a dying beast. Here she
offers the trail of blood trickling from her own hand as a last meal to a slain kinsman, keeping a
Hollywood, textbook warehouse showdown from waxing vapid.
Constrained by time as it is, "Blood" still connects emotionally. Charged by its action-oriented devices,
the film proves gripping from the opening shot of Saya placidly calm in a subway car ready to pounce on
her target to the closing image of American planes shipping troops to Vietnam. Even if somewhat forced,
Kitakubo's sense of cyclical violence artfully stains "Blood" with a woeful color.
