The Red Spectacles
| The Red Spectacles | |
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| Directed by | Mamoru Oshii |
| Produced by |
Shigeharu Shiba Daisuke Hayashi |
| Written by |
Kazunori Itō Mamoru Oshii |
| Starring |
Shigeru Chiba Machiko Washio Hideyuki Tanaka |
| Music by | Kenji Kawai |
| Cinematography | Yosuke Mamiya |
| Edited by | Seiji Morita |
| Distributed by | Omnibus Promotion |
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Release date
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Running time
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116 minutes |
| Country | Japan |
| Language | Japanese |
The Red Spectacles (紅い眼鏡 Akai Megane?) 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.
It is the end of the 20th century. The Metropolitan Police have begun to lose control of the city; crime runs rampant and people are no longer safe. The 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 "reinforcement gear" body armor and heavy weaponry.
But 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 policeman-like behavior. Public criticism grew as their investigational tactics grew more aggressive, crueler, and more corrupt. The turning point occurred when a Kerberos member, during a routine investigation, beat a misdemeanor offender to death.
This was the catalyst, the justification to shut the group down forever and dissolve it completely. However, there were those in the Kerberos group that refused to disarm. Three of the elite rebelled against the system, and fought their way through the city. The other two become wounded, and were unable to escape capture. Only one—senior detective Koichi Todome—managed to escape, and he promises the others that he will 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, trying to find his comrades left behind. But the city itself seems to resist him, and there are those who realize the threat Koichi imposes, that his return is more dangerous than anyone could realize.
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Wikipedia