Future Fighters

Future Fighters is some sort of live action mecha film set in the future featuring a who’s who of geek favorite Asian actors. In fact, the film seems to be heavily promoting itself in the geek community, constantly mentioning it’s Comic Con connections in press releases and geek connections of the actors, producers, and directors.

“In the 22nd Century the darkest region of space lies in the hearts of men.” The fate of all humanity rests with a small clutch of brave soldiers, and their sophisticated intra-stellar fighting machines, as they must defend the free solar system from a sinister invading force, in order to fight… for their future. But when allies become enemies and enemies become allies, battle-lines and allegiances are blurred as humanity races to save itself… from its own utter destruction.

Future Fighters has actors from the US, Hong Kong, and Japan, and is really trying to be a big co-production. There are a surprising number of these huge event films being announced in the past year or so – all 3D as well. Empires of the Deep is another one that comes to mind, except replace “mechas” and “space” with “mermaids” and “underwater.” I’ve gotten to the point of being burnt out on most of these huge productions, because most of them just aren’t any good. Remember how excited we all were when Kung Fu Cyborg was being announced and had rad production art? And then it sucked. I stopped paying attention to the huge sprawling war epics that were coming out of China after they were so boring that my wife, who will watch anything with Chinese people in it, got bored and went back to YouTube. I’m not saying this will be a bad film, I’m just saying it has a lot of work to do to not be a huge borefest. But one of these huge things should be good, via the law of averages. So get to work, Future Fighters, and be that one that’s good.

Who is starring? We got Yasuaki Kurata (Blood: The Last Vampire), Reuben Langdon (Devil May Cry video games), Gordon Liu (Kill Bill), Ray Park (Phantom Menace, GI Joe), Eriko Sato (Cutie Honey), Rina Takeda (High-Kick Girl!), and Lisa Sa (aka Lisa Cheng, a female body builder who has only had bit parts so far)

I’m not sure what these martial arts people are supposed to be doing in a mecha film. Rina Takeda’s job is to kick people in the face, you can’t really do that will strapped into a cockpit – okay, MAYBE Rina could… Ray Park and Gordon Liu are also people who should be showing off instead of piloting robots. In any event, this smells more like gimmick casting than actual real casting, and the bigger names will probably have smaller roles to the dudes we’ve never heard of. And maybe there is kicking in the face.

At least the production art looks cool (click for way too huge!):

Also put on your 3D glasses to see this in 3D:

So far all that is done is a preview trailer that isn’t part of the actual film: