Garm Wars The Last Druid

It's far too easy to dismiss Garm Wars: The Last Druid as incomprehensible fluff, and I can't blame you for thinking that way: the barebone essentials of its fictional world are dumped on us in the first fifteen minutes, the film (while clocking in at a brisk 90 minutes) drags at some points and the film lacks a definite beginning or end. It may understandably come off as frustrating.

However, we are talking about Mamoru Oshii here, and his works should rarely be taken at face value. For example, Ghost in the Shell can be seen as a reflection on our evolution of 'self' in the modern age; Sky Crawlers can be viewed as a critique of otaku culture. Garm Wars is a movie that needs to be seen more than once; getting through the seemingly impenetrable plot and deciphering the meaning of the film is where half the fun lies.

Garm Wars takes place on a planet ravaged by war. What once was eight tribes has been reduced to three thanks to endless battles waged by soldiers who live, fight, die and are redownloaded unto new bodies. One day a mysterious man, an even more mysterious figure, and a dog are intercepted by a cruiser belonging to one of these tribes. This sparks a journey by an unlikely group of characters to find the secret of the Garm and the reason their people fight.

Oshii's motifs and themes from previous films abound in this movie. The dialogue hints that the film takes place in a virtual construct, perhaps a world related to the settings of previous Oshii live action films Avalon (2001) and Assault Girls (2009) - for all intents and purposes, this may be a shared universe. The movie tackles themes of identity, evident in his adaptation of Ghost in the Shell (1995); as well as its main theme: the burden of neverending conflict as seen in Sky Crawlers (2008). There are also a ton of Judeo-Christian religious symbols through both visuals and dialogue, and Oshii's favorite motif - the Basset Hound, makes an appearance, almost as a supernatural, godlike figure.

The war is hardly personal to us viewers, as we are not invested in the conflict of these tribes. Instead we look at the war as a concept. Garm Wars approaches the theme of war in that it robs us of our identity as a people or culture. The collective memory of the tribes makes them homogenous, making them lose their individuality. A query about a certain clone's first memory is met with derision. As we learn during the climax of the film, the war itself can have no intrinsic meaning; the Garm are basically fighting for nothing. The movie concentrates instead on how war dehumanizes its participants, forcing them to become literal machines of war, (in our protagonists' case) becoming living weapons that "reload" themselves with literal metaphors for ammunition.

Oshii's movies usually frame homeostasis, whether societal or not, as one of its principal antagonists. The Garm tribes' focus on war has stagnated their society, degrading it slowly. Our main characters search for the truth in the hopes of changing the balance, just as the Kildren fight to defeat the Teacher in Sky Crawlers, or how the Major evolves with the Puppet Master in GITS, or how Ash achieves access to Avalon. The results in all of these films are pretty mixed.

Without any true ending, the film takes a very eastern storytelling approach - with the journey, including all questions asked along the way, being more important than the destination. It's more esoteric compared to Oshii's other works and more in line with his experimental stuff. Still, it's quite interesting fare and it's something of a miracle that local distributors picked this one up.