VividSimon Simply Perfect

Huievest Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Suman Roberson It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

Tayyab Torres Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

sivachennai Mouse watch for a Japanese sci-fi fan.great story and twists

marcorivas54 Here is another good film by one of my favorite Japanese directors Takashi Miike. This film is based off a manga of the same name and shows the first arc of the manga. From the very beginning of the film it's really interesting and catches your attention unlike other films where the attention has to be caught sometime inwards. The basic premise of the film is students having to play games to survive and if you lost at these games you die gruesome deaths. There is a lot of blood and death and the characters in this film are a mix of actual people and CGI characters. I liked the CGI of the fictional characters in this film because it seemed to fit so well with everything. It's not like that completely horrible animation where it sucks.

nevillechan This film manages to butcher the source content such that readers of the manga would be baffled by the decisions of what was omitted as well as the large amount by which the movie strays from the source material. The movie feels like the writers decided to stick to the source material faithfully for the first half, then give up and write the second half drunk while being narrated by a five-year-old. The film seems to tease a sequel yet the butchering of the material in the second half basically eliminates the possibility. (unless they reboot or do a film of the second manga instead.)In addition, the film also fails to provide a proper standalone package through the inclusion of unnecessary element such as Enokida Takumi, who gets surprising amounts of character depth even though he contributes nothing but confusion to the film.Personally I find that the film over-complicates the killing methods, choosing strange and "creative" killing methods (red marbles? really?) over the source material's straightforward blow- off-a-head-or-limbs-with-projectiles-or-lasers-and-let-the- associated-gore-fly approach.

zuhairvazir The synopsis to this toy store killing machine immediately brings an earlier Japanese film to mind, the ruthless and fumingly shocking 'Battle Royale, 2000' from auteur Kinji Fukasaku (Tora! Tora! Tora!, 1970). However Miike's film-cunning and dice rolls are perhaps simply far more simple than the keen viewer would like to imagine. Simple thus unworried, assured, extremely dark-humored, filled with rapid-fire philosophy and at least six blood banks blown to pieces.Take the sound editing for instance. We know what has happened despite the event not being shown and instead replaced by an elementary sound or a children's song. 'As the Gods Will' is a director's nightmare, a feat only someTHING like Miike can execute.Splattered with a plethora of psyched out colours and one of the few films where the CGI works like the crown wheel of the Oyster Perpetual, Miike's direction feels more confident as his obsession with Manga and Nao Ômori (Ichi the Killer, 2001) grows into a playful bear, the size of two Transformers, when they're not vehicles.This film is filled with surreal images and evidently decapitated mannequins with floored extras mixed in with the lot. It is 'Maze Runner' meets 'The Running Man' inside Miike's Daedalian head. Perhaps that is an overstatement, probably I'm still thinking; 'but seriously, what's the deal here?'. However it may be, Miike has paid homage to ancient Japanese films of gore... I mean yore. Well not really, this seems more like the stop motion films from the Golden Age of Japanese cinema and director Ishiro Honda - but 'As the Gods Will' is sort of an antithesis to those films in terms of its antagonist's characterization and build up.The director's films are far from subtle, including this baby cannibal elephant; however this time there is a certain calm undercurrent to the approach and style of the hypermanic Takashi Miike.A strangely entertaining film that must be watched to further strengthen faith in the art of cinema.Absolutely unbelievable.