Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #31042 in DVD
• Released on: 2002-04-22
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Black & White, Colour, Full Screen, PAL
• Original language: Japanese
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 218 minutes

Video Description
DVD Special Features:

Production Notes
Filmographies
Dolby Digital 2.0
Subtitles: English
Letterbox 4:3 Aspect Ratio

Synopsis
Following a deadly bus hijacking in southwest Japan, the three survivors--Makato (Koji Yakusho), the bus driver; Kozue (Aoi Miyazaki), a young girl; and Naoki (Masaru Miyazaki), her older brother--find further tragedy in their personal lives. When the traumatized Makato eventually contacts Kozue and Naoki two years later, he moves into their home and becomes a father figure for the two children, who have stopped speaking. The trio are then joined by Akihiko (Yohichiroh Saitoh), Kozue and Naoki's college student cousin, and together this odd surrogate family embarks on a road trip across Japan. However, a string of murders appears to be following them and threatens to permanently disrupt their quest to regain normal lives.
Clocking in at more than three and a half hours, Shinji Aoyama's EUREKA is a daunting film that rewards patient viewers with an utterly unique and moving cinematic experience. Shot in black and white with a sepia tone, the movie features breathtaking photography by Masaki Tamra. In part an ode to John Ford's THE SEARCHERS, EUREKA features an outstanding performance by Yakusho in the John Wayne-like leading role.

From the Back Cover
When a bus is violently hijacked in a small Japanese town, only three people survive: the guilt wracked driver Makoto (Koji Yakusho), and younger brother and sister, Kozue and Naoki. Two years on, each of them, still traumatized by their ordeal, struggle to re-engage with life. But then one day Makoto impulsively buys a bus, and sets off with Kozue and Naoki on a long journey across Japan, which becomes a carthartic odyssey of spiritual self-discovery. Shinji Aoyama’s beautifully shot drama is a serene and resonant meditation on the psychological scars wrought upon the victims of terror and violence and of the courage and inner-strenght they must find to survive.

Customer Reviews

An outstanding, joyous statement of hope and rebirth
This is an eerily entrancing experience delivered up by director Shinji Aoyama. Shot in black and white, but on colour film, the images drift into sepia or become almost pastel tones. "Eureka" is primarily a visual experience, one of the most lyrically beautiful pieces of cinema I've ever seen.

Yet such a bleak story! A bus is hijacked. People die. There is no evident reason - the crime is random, chaotic, motiveless. The survivors are the driver and two school children, a brother and sister. Now, leap forward two years. How have they coped? What effect has the violence had on their lives?

The children have lost their parents and are alone in a big house. They do not speak. The bus driver moves in with them, acting as their parents, or simply as someone who can understand their pain and confusion. Perhaps the only one who can. The children appear to communicate telepathically. Meanwhile, a series of murders has begun and the prime suspect is the bus driver.

The driver looks for some cathartic experience to help them get on with their lives. He buys a bus. Together they transform it into a mobile home and set off on a journey. Bus drivers follow the same route day in, day out. But this is a magical mystery tour, a process of self-discovery.

Shinji Aoyama says that he was influenced by John Ford's "The Searchers", in which John Wayne searches for a young Natalie Wood, a child kidnapped in an Indian raid. "Eureka" doesn't have the overt violence and anger of Wayne's character. Makoto, the driver, is a much gentler individual. But the theme of the film is one of searching - for the lost voices, the lost emotions, the loss of self.

Does violence contaminate the victim? Makoto wonders if it has infected them all. As a victim of violence he has been powerless. Perhaps the only way a victim can recover is to exert power over others, to violate, terrorise, and brutalise others. Would the act of murder free him of the guilt of survival? They take off in the bus in search of rebirth.

"Eureka" is a long film - three and a half hours. Its plot is a narrow strand. This is the antithesis of the action movie. Much of the filming is in long shot, with the actors distant figures. There are no close-ups. The visuals are extraordinary. Much use is made of the intense contrast of black and white - night time shots, use of sunlight and shade, dense dark scenes with only a central pool of light.

The camera frames a scene and holds it, dwells on it languidly. There are long silences. The film could have been cut in half, but this frozen timelessness is an essential part of the experience the survivors endure.

There is virtually no music - a couple of almost ironic intrusions. The sound is entirely naturalistic. The black and white filming seems to enhance the notion of reality. It's as if you are watching a documentary, intruding on the intimate lives of victims, watching through distant cameras with only the sounds of nature and the modern world to intrude.

And so much of the film presents you with pattern and graphic imagery: the stripes and checks of clothing, the stripes of wooden boards, the patterns of the natural world, of roads and railways. The pattern of the bus driver's routine has been shattered. For the victims there is no longer any pattern to life, just a bland sameness, day after day.

Instead, life flows like water. Much use is made of the images of water, of the natural cycle of rain flowing though the streams and rivers back to the sea. In the sea lies rebirth, in the sea lies hope and self-discovery.

But this is one of the most joyously hopeful and positive films I've ever seen. Bleak, set in a rural Japan which offers up none of the usual clichés of Japanese life, it transcends its extraordinary visual richness to offer up a hymn to the struggle of modern man, woman and child, searching for an explanation, for a reason for life in the face of violence and the unpredictable. It is a potent, powerful statement about the need to be reborn, to rediscover self and a sense of purpose.

An outstanding film, but not one which is going to capture everyone's imagination. It's a film you grow into. It's a film which you visually enjoy. It's a film in which, as you recognise the struggle faced by the survivors, you too begin to imagine your own need for a pilgrimage of self-discovery. Outstanding, but I suggest you rent it in the first instance ... and see how quickly it grows on you.

Modern Masterpiece
You spend your whole life looking for a film that works for you. When you feel depressed or are just looking for something to understand you, you look towards film when people are incapable. EUREKA did it for me. A four-hour long epic that reached straight into my heart and soul and refused to let go. Shinji Aoyama has created a breath-taking piece of modern cinema.
Many people will never have sat through a film of this calibre, and many just don't have the patience. Which is such a shame because, it beats most films out there today.
"Mesmerising, ravishing" says Time Out; "Moving... the acting is sublime" says Uncut; "Stunning.. deeply affecting" says The Independent; "Beautiful.. a moving pschological fable about trauma, loss, mourning and healing - a mesmerising journey across genre boundaries" says Fiilm Comment.
Shinji Aoyama's film will speak to me for the rest of my life and I will speak of it whenever I speak of film. Not to see this is a crime - pick up your copy today and you will forever be moved by the medium of cinema. No other film will seem worthwhile.

Entrancing
This is a very, very long film, but I sat through it all captivated by the melancholy world created by Shinji Aoyama. Koji Yakusho is superb as the bus driver Makoto who is driven to the very edge by the brutal hijacking that starts the film. The meditation on the psychological scars that terror inflicts on its victims resonates with our times even more now than when this fantastic film was made.