Kakeru is a high
school student who along with five other teenagers is suddenly pulled into the
Red Night, a plane shifted world tinted with crimson where crystal towers
stretch up to the sky and an imprisoned young woman is guarded by hideous
monstrosities known as the Black Knights.
That’s
the setup, and for most of the 12-episode series that’s pretty much all you
get. The story, such as it is, meanders aimlessly between fight scenes and
lengthy character exchanges that go nowhere, each interspersed with weak sapphic
interplay, jiggling boobs and gratuitous upskirt underwear shots so frequent
that they would actually get tedious even if you’re into that kind of thing.
It’s
as though someone came up with a basic premise of dual dimensions and a sextet
of Chosen Ones being periodically pulled into a crimson Silent Hill, but then
didn’t bother to develop it into an actual story. It would have helped to have at
least spent some more time developing the characters rather than their esoteric
abilities, but what brief back stories we get do little in the way of expanding
or even explaining their personalities.
While
the regular fight scenes with the Black Knights and their inexhaustible army of
expendable mooks offer some degree of peril for the characters, none of them
are interesting enough to make you actually care whether they live or die,
while the rules by which everyone’s abilities operate are so inconsistent that it
becomes difficult to become invested in anything that’s going on.
The
plot ambles along with little in the way of genuine development until late on
when everything becomes unsatisfactorily resolved in a cluster bomb of
expository nonsense and arbitrary bullshit, including the actual reason why
these characters specifically were pulled together into this ethereal
nightmare, something the story didn’t previously even hint at. It’s made even
worse by those imparting the knowledge having been aware of the true extent of
the situation from the very beginning, but just didn’t bother telling anyone.
The
late-on central revelation actually had the potential to allow for some
introspection into the nature of good and evil or free will and destiny, and
offer some meaningful insight into precisely what it is that makes us human, but
the cack-handed manner in which it was executed leaves it as just another example
of nothing happening throughout the series that forms even the slightest bit of
coherence.
11eyes /
Cert: 15 / Director: Masami Shimoda / Screenplay: Kenichi Kanemaki, Mayori
Sekijima, Mie Kaga / Starring: Daisuke Ono, Mai Goto, Yuu Asakawa, Oma
Ichimura, Showtaro Morikubo / Release Date: 19th September
