Goku Midnight Eye is a WEIRD anime … yes, even by late 1980s standards!
Let me start off by saying I have no earthly clue what this movie is supposed to be about. Goku Midnight Eye is obviously based on a manga (aren’t they always?) and it feels like sort of a combination of Blade Runner and Akira, only with WAY more gratuitous nudity and grotesque body horror elements than either of those films. Which, of course, is a good thing in our eyes.
Sure, Goku Midnight Eye isn’t the most original concept for an anime. Indeed, you can probably compare it to about three or four others from the same time frame and you’d find only a few superficial differences. But what it lacks in originality it makes up for with sheer style and chutzpah. It’s over the top, even by late 1980s anime standards. And that’s saying something.
Alright, the basics first. Goku Midnight Eye is actually two one-hour movies sandwiched together into a duology that kinda sorta but not technically makes up a single, stand-alone story. You could watch one segment without watching the other and still mostly comprehend what’s going on, but you need to watch both of them back to back to really get the most mileage out of the thing. Which is kinda weird, because the first episode is WAY better than the second.
Goku Midnight Eye is pretty much what happens when you mix Lethal Weapon, Robocop and Showgirls in a blender and let the Japanese analog to David Cronenberg direct it. It revolves around a private eye (named Goku, so now you understand where the title comes from) who is investigating a mysterious string of suicides … and almost falls prey himself, when it’s revealed that the “suicides” are actually a bunch of murders perpetrated by an assassin with hypno powers and … well, it’s already getting confusing, isn’t it?
OK, so there’s some Scanners/Manchurian Candidate/The Fury quasi-political stuff going on here. But it’s an aside, really. All you need to know is that it’s the future — 2014, to be exact — and Tokyo is a technological utopia but also kind of a surveillance state at the same time. In fact, it’s pretty much implied that the technology has already gone sentient and taken over most of society, which makes Goku pretty much a god among men when he receives an eye transplant that allows him to hack into ANY computerized system anywhere in the world. Oh, and he gets this kinda weird looking metal staff as a weapon, too, but that’s WAY less impressive than the computer-hacking-eye thing.
I guess you can figure out the rest of the story on your own. Goku keeps going down a rabbit hole, trying to found out who is responsible for the rash of murders and what their ulterior motives may be. Along the way, it also gives him ample opportunities to seduce a few comely females and yeah, some of the “intimate” scenes are a bit … problematic. I don’t want to give away too much, but if they give you the ick, you’re not alone.
Now, it may not sound like a “horror” anime, but it definitely is. Not only do we have evil autocrats making people blow their own brains out, we’ve got half woman, half motorcycle abominations who like to breath carbon monoxide on people until they die. I’ve seen a LOT of freaky things in ‘80s cartoons from Japan, and the monsters in this movie are some of the freakiest you’ll ever lay your eyes on.
Admittedly, the second half of Goku Midnight Eye isn’t as engaging. It becomes way too predictable, way too procedural and way too talky for a movie about a robo-detective who can hijack the internet and pretty much do whatever he wants. Thankfully, even when the story dips into the doldrums the sheer aesthetics of the movie keeps things interesting. Sure, visuals can only carry an anime so far, but there’s no denying they get a lot of leg work in for Goku Midnight Eye.
It’s not as violent or as sexually explicit as a lot of late ‘80s anime, but it’s still pushing the envelope into “adults only and we mean it” territory pretty hard. If they give you pacing and structure feels somewhat familiar to you, it probably should. That’s because it was directed by Yoshiaki Kawajiri, a guy who already gave us Wicked City and would later give us Ninja Scroll, one of the most iconic and influential anime releases of the 1990s. You can see a lot of that same style, energy and panache on display in Goku Midnight Eye, even when the plot and execution isn’t quite up to par with Kawajiri’s best work.
It’s a little hard to give a movie like this your standard “thumbs up or thumbs down” verdict. It’s a film that has its obvious ups and downs and if you’re not into stuff like this it clearly won’t make you a fan. But as predictable as the material may be, the good stuff in Goku Midnight Eye is very good and even if you don’t like the film as a whole you’ll still probably find bits and pieces of it that you do enjoy — even if it’s only the art style or the hilariously corny dialogue or the manic action set pieces.
Be forewarned, though, that this is one of those anime productions with a lot of strobing lights effects. So if you’re worried about seizures, you might want to skip this one altogether.
