is a 1987 Japanese film directed by Mamoru Oshii, co-written with Kazunori Ito, and starring Shigeru Chiba and Mako Hyodo. This is the first film of the '' Kerberos saga''.

Plot

It is the end of the 20th century. The

Metropolitan Police The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), formerly and still commonly known as the Metropolitan Police (and informally as the Met Police, the Met, Scotland Yard, or the Yard), is the territorial police force responsible for law enforcement and ...

have begun to lose control of Tokyo; crime is rampant and people are no longer safe. Their solution: the establishment of the Anti Vicious Crime Heavily Armored Mobile Special Investigations Unit. Created by men and women of high intellect and physical strength who had a particularly strong, even fanatical sense of justice, they were nicknamed "Kerberos", and armed with special body armor called "reinforcement gear" and heavy weaponry. What started as a noble and courageous effort to stop the onslaught of crime soon spiraled out of control. Their overzealous actions and fanatical hatred of evil soon led to less-than police-like behavior. Public criticism grew as their investigative tactics became more aggressive, cruel, and corrupt. The turning point occurred when a Kerberos member, during a routine investigation, beat a misdemeanor offender to death. This was the catalyst and justification to shut the group down forever and dissolve it completely. However, there were those in the Kerberos group who refused to disarm. Three of the elite rebelled against the system, and fought their way through the city. Two were wounded, and unable to escape capture. Only one—senior detective, Koichi Todome, managed to escape, and he promised the others that he would return for them. Several years later, Koichi, a fugitive from the government, returns home for reasons that seem unclear. The city has decayed at an exponential rate and is completely unlike the place he left behind. Everything is surreal and strange, blurred and nondescript. He wanders, trying to find some semblance of his past and to find the comrades he'd left behind. But, the city itself seems to resist him, and there are those who realize the threat that Koichi poses, and his return is more dangerous than anyone realizes. In the end, it is revealed that most of Koichi's exploits in Japan are in fact a dying dream, as he is attacked and killed shortly after returning to Japan.

Cast

* Shigeru Chiba - Kōichi Todome * Machiko Washio - Washio Midori * Hideyuki Tanaka - Sōichirō Toribe * Tessho Genda - Bunmei Muroto * Mako Hyodo - Young Lady * Hideyo Amamoto -

Moongaze Ginji This is a character guide to the radio drama, film, manga and anime works ''Kerberos saga'' (ケルベロス・サーガ, ''keruberosu saga''). Characters are sorted by organizations or groups according to the original works. The English adaptat ...

*offscreen - Hamburger Tetsu *offscreen - Beefbowl Ushigoro *offscreen - Medium Hot Sabu *offscreen - Baked Bean Pastry Amataro *offscreen - Crepe Mami * Ichiro Nagai - Middle-aged man in billiards, taxi driver's voice * Yasuo Otsuka - Taxi driver * Oikawa Hiroe - Oriental Hotel receptionist * Fuyuki Shinada - Soba Udon cook * Fumi Hirano - Airport announcer *Kintaroh Sakata - Umibōzu

Production

Several of the cast members are voice actors and appeared in '' Urusei Yatsura'', which Oshii worked on as chief director and head writer. ''The Red Spectacles'' is probably Oshii's most literate feature work. Not only, dialogue and narrative parts are prominent over ''drama'' but the film contains a variety of philosophical concepts such as Free will and

Determinism Determinism is a philosophical view, where all events are determined completely by previously existing causes. Deterministic theories throughout the history of philosophy have developed from diverse and sometimes overlapping motives and consi ...

, mentioned through fables, like "''The Magnet and the Iron Sands''" and "''The Ogre Saved by the Fisherman''", or through classic poet-authors quotes, Shakespeare and Pushkin. The characters refers to European medieval tales and Greek mythology, such as oral versions of '' Little Red Riding Hood'' and the three-headed watchdog of

Hell In religion and folklore, hell is a location in the afterlife in which evil souls are subjected to punitive suffering, most often through torture, as eternal punishment after death. Religions with a linear divine history often depict hell ...

Cerberus.

Releases

On February 25, 2003, the DVD edition was made available in Japan as part of the ''Mamoru Oshii Cinema Trilogy'' anthology box set, which contained four DVDs and one soundtrack CD. On November 4 of the same year, a subtitled version of ''Akai megane'' was released in North America as both a single DVD and also as part of a US release of the box set. The US version of the trilogy box set has different box artwork and lacks the "Revisited Scene & Production" DVD of the Japanese version. The American ''The Red Spectacles'' DVD edition was reprinted in 2004, and since then is only available in the box set which was printed three times as of 2006 and remains the only edition released outside Japan.

Related works

''The Red Spectacles'' is the first film of the '' Kerberos saga''. Oshii would write a lengthy comic series expanding on the universe. '' While Waiting for the Red Spectacles'' (1987) is a radio drama prequel written by Kazunori Itō with an original soundtrack composed by Kenji Kawai. The film would be followed by two prequels: '' StrayDog: Kerberos Panzer Cops'' (1991) and '' Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade'' (1999).

References

External links

Kerberos saga official website
(''Japanese'') * {{DEFAULTSORT:Red Spectacles, The 1987 films 1980s science fiction thriller films Japanese black-and-white films Films directed by Mamoru Oshii Films set in 1995 1980s Japanese-language films Japanese independent films Kerberos saga Japanese political thriller films Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department in fiction Films scored by Kenji Kawai 1987 independent films 1980s political thriller films Japanese science fiction thriller films 1980s Japanese films