BERSERK Golden Age Arc Review
You may have noticed that the main Movie Guide is down a couple of anime movies as of late. Rest assured that this is only temporary as we were originally holding off on posting a couple of movies to the Guide so that we could have a huge chunk of new content available when AMG 2.0 launches in the near future. We’ve realized, though, that holding out on adding these movies is making the Guide seem a bit dated, so they’ll be coming thick and fast before the new design goes live so that you can continue to be up-to-date on the latest great anime movies.
One notable removal from the Guide, though, is Berserk Golden Age Arc I: The Egg of the King. While I enjoyed the movie well enough at the time, its inclusion largely hinged upon the promise it held as the opener to a three part series. Viz was kind enough to send us Blu-ray copies of the next two films and upon seeing the Golden Age Arc as a whole, I realized that the movies present a story with a much more niche appeal than I had originally supposed.
The first Berserk movie follows a rogue mercenary named Guts as he makes a name for himself and then is more or less conscripted into service with a mercenary group called the Band of the Hawk, led by an androgynous and charismatic man named Griffith, along with the conquests they participate in and the complex relationships that develop between Guts, Griffith, and a high-ranking female mercenary called Casca. While this story seems pretty ordinary to begin with, the next two Berserk films progressively spiral down into a hentai-quality sex scene ridden cinematic mess. The second film is punctuated near the end by a graphic sex scene with one of the main characters and a seemingly borderline under-aged girl and the third departs reality almost entirely for a realm filled with grotesque monsters and even more graphic sex and rape scenes. It then tops it all off with an entirely unsatisfying cliffhanger obviously leading into the anime series’ next story arc, and I wouldn’t feel right recommending such a movie series to the average anime viewer.
Had I known what I was getting into at the start of watching the Berserk movies, I certainly wouldn’t have continued past the first movie. The elements of the movie that I forgave like the often uncalled for nudity and the jarringly cheap CG animation mixed in for random shots with traditional animation that I thought would perhaps go away as the series progressed were exponentially accentuated instead. Kentaru Miura’s award-winning Berserk manga series may be even more graphic than what we got in the films, but I think that such visceral tales lend themselves much better to comic pages than films of this calibre.
The Blu-rays themselves were well made, for the record. They have some very decently amusing bloopers and out-takes from the English dubbing process and interviews with key production staff in addition to sporting crystal-clear 1080p video and impressive DTS-HD Master Audio in both English and Japanese.
So, while the movie series is indeed missable for all but the most hardcore of Berserk fans or lovers of graphic sex and gore, the manga series has been running successfully for more than two decades and I’m certainly not well informed enough about it to suggest that everyone skip it entirely. Just be warned that it’s about as graphic as you can get for mainstream media and not something you would be likely to sit down and watch with friends some lazy afternoon.
