Our main character in the movie is Kasumi Izumi, a fifteen-year-old girl infected with the Medusa virus. She’s rather shy and not very outspoken, kinda bookish in a way.
The same as the manga, Kasumi has a twin sister, Shizuku, who is outgoing and friendly compared to her sister. The two are very close, since their parents have passed away from the Medusa virus.
Both sisters are infected with Medusa, and yet Kasumi is the only one chosen to be able to use the cold sleep capsules, which will stop the virus from ravaging her body until a cure can be found. Her looks and personality don’t differ much from the manga, although her parents in the manga are still alive while in the anime, they're dead and these two are orphans.
Go figure.
It seems that her main motivation in this movie is to find her sister Shizuku and be reunited with her, which begs the question of what happened with the ending? (I’ll talk about this more in a minute.)
Kasumi is surrounded by a group of unique supporting characters.
We have the main love interest, Marco Owen, a former prisoner with an agenda of his own.
There’s also Ron, the one obligatory black guy who is a former police officer infected with Medusa.
Katherine is a former nurse suffering from the virus, who is traumatized by the fact that she abused her son.
Tim, who is implied to be Katherine’s son, is a boy obsessed with video games chosen to be one of the 160 who can use the capsules.
We also have Peter, the scientist who developed the cold sleep capsules,
a random Italian senator who gets killed almost instantly, and Mr. Vega, the director of the cold sleep center. (sorry, couldn't find any good pictures of them)
The biggest change I noticed in terms of character development was with Katherine’s character.
In the manga, she’s traumatized because she was a victim of domestic abuse and couldn’t protect her son properly, as a mother should. Her son, in the manga, is named Michael, not Tim, and Tim, the child who survives in the capsules, is still called Tim, so the author, Yuji Iwahara, obviously did not intend for Tim to be Katherine’s child.
SPOILER ALERT BELOW
Also, Katherine in the manga is given a smallish arc of her own – after awakening from the capsules and running for their lives, Katherine’s body begins to succumb to Medusa, and she starts petrifying. Pursued endlessly by monsters, Katherine knows there is no hope for her and wants to use what is left of her life to protect the others, especially Tim. After a revelation that Medusa can make your dreams a reality, Katherine sacrifices her life to bring forth an eagle-type creature representing her motherly instinct, and is able to fight against the monsters to protect everyone.
In the movie, however, her character is reduced to a bit part, a woman obsessed with the tale of Sleeping Beauty who is very depressive and quiet most of the time, quite different from the manga, where she is the one to encourage everyone else. The movie gives the “encouragement” role to Kasumi.
In fact, the movie reduces basically everyone else to merely a bit role, rather than them being supporting characters who provide help to Kasumi. I mean, I know that there’s sort of a restriction on how much you can develop everyone in only an hour and a half worth of screen time, but this, combined with my other complaints about the movie, just reinforces my belief that this would have been better off as a series rather than just a movie. There was just way too much material to cover, and the movie really didn’t do it justice.
In terms of plot… what can I say? The movie really did not do justice to the manga. SPOILERS ABOUND, by the way, so be warned.
Medusa is an unknown virus ravaging all of humanity, creating mass worldwide panic and leaving scientists and doctors baffled as to the cause, or how to treat or cure it. It has a 100% fatality, and once symptoms appear, there is a twelve-hour window before the infected person is turned completely to stone.
A rich man who lost his son to Medusa funds a research project to help advance science to find a cure by hiring scientists to create cryopods, which will hold someone in suspended animation until awakened. This will allow 160 people to survive until a cure can be found and they can be awakened and administered treatment, however, some of the people in the cryopods awaken before a cure is found, to a world encased by thorns and inhabited by terrifying monsters who want to eat them.
Through their struggles to survive in an impossible situation, it is revealed that only about 24 hours have passed since they entered the capsules and that the cold sleep capsules are a plot by a bad guy, Zeus, that Marco despises who wants to use Medusa to create a world of his own creation. How will he do this? By having everyone in the capsules dream vivid dreams, and by doing so, creating a pantheon of superhuman creatures that have been born from the Medusa-infected victims sleeping in the capsules.
Meanwhile, Kasumi is led to a research lab where Alice, the girl who was first infected with Medusa, stays. Alice no longer has any semblance of a body, and Medusa is the only thing keeping her alive, basically. Long story short, Marco dies, but Alice sacrifices herself to bring him back, and Kasumi and Marco have to work together to beat Zeus.
Because Zeus has long since discarded his physical body in favor of a computer-generated image of himself, Marco is able to create a computer program to destroy him. Kasumi, meanwhile, happens upon her sister, asleep in a bed of thorns.
Shizuku has a bandage around her neck, and Kasumi realizes that they’ve been switched: when Kasumi got the news that she, not Shizuku, could go into the capsules, she tried to kill herself by slicing her neck with a razor blade, and that’s where the bandage comes from. Therefore, the body in front of her is actually her own and not Shizuku, and Kasumi realizes that she is actually dead – Kasumi tried to kill herself by jumping off a cliff just as they were entering the cold sleep center, and succeeded.
Shizuku was so distraught that the Medusa in her transformed, and she created this world so that Kasumi would still be alive. The story ends with Marco, Kasumi, Tim, and the creatures created by Zeus realizing that now everyone around the world infected with the Medusa virus has the power to fight it off, and they’re going to go make sure the world is safe. Kasumi and Marco declare their love for each other, but Kasumi has lost Shizuku, her sister and her best friend. It’s a bit confusing, but in a nutshell, that’s the manga plot.
In the movie, however, it’s changed: Zeus has completely disappeared from the story, and all the other characters are reduced to mere bit parts. Alice, rather than being a deformed, living child, has died years ago.
In the manga, the characters are forced to use their own powers to discover the truth for themselves, fighting monsters and finding a security station where a tape still exists that shows the director of the facility explaining what happened and then shooting himself in the head.
But in the movie, the director never dies, and it’s not really explained how or why, except that at one point, he wanders into this room where the survivors are hiding to explain the plot, and then turns into a sort-of villain who does the stereotypical “Haha I am evil and I will now enact my plan to take over the world!” But not even ten minutes of screen time pass before he’s defeated and the survivors make their way outside.
The ending also killed off some major characters who not only didn’t die in the manga, but didn’t deserve to die in terms of the movie itself. Mainly Marco, who survives in the manga and does EVERYTHING within his power to protect Kasumi and give her strength, and who literally DEFIES death in the manga (seriously, he dies and he’s about to cross over to the other side, but then he tells Death to screw himself and goes back to the world of the living.) How badass is that?
And the movie just killed him off, and not even in the sort of badass way he deserved – he and Kasumi are sitting on the cliff, reflecting on how Kasumi is just a figment of Shizuku’s imagination, and then he’s like “This is my final wish” and his head drops forward onto his chest, and then Kasumi starts screaming and crying her eyes out and we realize he’s dead.
REALLY? REALLY? You KILLED MARCO IN A NON-BADASS WAY. Not acceptable.
The animation in the movie is just drop-dead gorgeous, and the ending theme was actually really beautiful, but the plot of this movie and the fact that it deviated WAY TOO MUCH from the original manga leaves you feeling that you’ve just been mindf*cked.
As I watched the credits roll across the screen, I was barely hearing the ending music because I was just screaming at my computer “EXPLANATIONS, PLEASE! EXPLANATIONS!”
So after that long, rambly post, how do I feel about this movie?
It was a good attempt to adapt the manga, but an hour and a half really doesn’t do justice to six volumes’ worth of material. Not sure why they HAD to adapt it as a movie instead of a series, but it would have been much better off as a series, so that some of the more intricate plot points could be explored and we could actually have a FREAKIN’ villain for once.
All in all, the movie raises some interesting points about mortality, humanity, and the like, but it doesn’t do the manga justice. If you’re going to watch the movie, wait until after you’ve done so to read the manga. If you read the manga first, you WILL freak out about Marco’s death. Trust me. If you watch the movie first and then go back and read the manga, it’s not as painful.
When I watch a movie that’s based off of a book or a graphic novel, I expect the movie to be good enough so that even if I haven’t read the original source material, I don’t have to feel cheated when I watch it. If I finish a movie that was based off a book and I feel like I need to run out to the library and read the book, you haven’t made a good movie, and that was definitely the case here.
The movie’s ending left so many unanswered questions that I needed to go and finish reading the manga in order to understand what really happened. Kazuyoshi Katayama, (the guy who directed the KoT movie) PLEASE don’t screw up another manga. PLEASE.
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