Megazone 23 is laser-focused on its target market. Everything about the film is carefully arranged to appeal to what I would guess is a 15-year-old boy. You have your motorcycles, robots, stylish clothes, pretty girls, and lots and lots of hair! The film is like one long shampoo ad. The hairstyles aren’t exactly something young boys could easily emulate in real life, but they are not quite as far-fetched as Dragon Ball Z.

Megazone 23 is so tightly pointed at what the producers thought 15-year-old boys wanted it feels like a parody. It’s a cross between Beverly Hills 90210 and The Matrix with the added bonus of not-so-subtle product placements for Coca-Cola and McDonald’s.

  Megazone 23 isn’t much of a movie but, it’s still pretty entertaining. Ishiguro, the director, sure loves his montages. There is the classic motorcycle chase montage with motion lines and split screens-

 There’s the 80’s Flashdance rip-off montage with sweatbands and spandex- 

But my favorite has to be the sexposition montage. How are you going to keep a bunch of 15-year-old boys engaged while you dump out a whole bunch of boring exposition? Have it play as a dialogue while the two main characters have sex. It doesn’t make any sense, but it will keep them boys glued to the screen.

Megazone 23 went through several incarnations before it finally ended up getting released straight to video. It was originally going to be an anime television series, but then there were budget cuts and other changes and it ended up being mushed together into three movies. I watched the first one and I’m happy to leave it at that. 

The premise is that the Earth underwent some kind of environmental disaster, everyone got loaded onto giant spaceship-cities and the different ships started fighting each other, or something to that effect. The people on the ships are controlled by a computer and believe they are still living back on Earth. Shougo, our hero with the fabulous hair, gets a hold of a motorcycle that can turn into a robot and battles to save… I’m not sure who he is trying to save or what he is trying to accomplish, but he loves Yui who also happens to have beautiful hair. Together they make a lot one syllable exclamations of surprise, arousal, and determination like “uh,” “oh,” “eh,” and “huh.” 

The movie ends on a cliffhanger, although a cliffhanger implies that the audience is left wanting to see what happens next, and that just wasn’t the case with me. I did like some of the pretty explosions though- 

I also liked some of the hearing impaired subtitles-

I think “Conspiratorial Piano” would make a mighty fine name for a band, and “Getting To Know Each Other Music” could be the name of their first album. I guess watching Megazone 23 wasn’t a complete waste of time. I’ll go tune up my guitar.

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