I only know the summary part of the manga, so I will stick to the movie itself. The movie starts with two old friends( ? ) that coincidentally meet on a train platform. In this brief moment, they attempt to rescue a man off of the train tracks and in trying this, they are killed by the oncoming train. Or were they? The two awaken in a room with a few other strangers, all of which claim to have been killed. Accompanying them is a mysterious black orb which gives some very vague instructions on what the "group" needs to do. Basically the task is to kill aliens that are on the earth hiding out. Sounds corny, but it is far from that. The movie is so well filmed including cinematography, editing, locale that pretty much whatever the group was sent to do was going to be a treat. Lucky for us viewers, it was an exciting mission at that. As the movie progresses, we learn that each person is awarded "points" for surviving (since if not, well, they are dead) and what can be done with those points is part of the mystery. The effects are very good, and basic, not overdone at all. This makes it much easier to get into the film and the characters in it. The acting was very good, even if I personally had to be distracted from their performances by reading the subtitles. Either way, I could tell by visual features and expressions that it was well done. Each encounter gets more and more difficult, as one would assume, and leads to a very open ended climax that makes you want to see more. I thoroughly enjoyed this movie from start to finish and recommend it to anyone that likes sci-fi and originality. Please Hollywood, can you keep your hands off and not remake this, let the Japanese do their thing, they have brought us a gem in this as it is. Enjoy. 6.9/10
