Thanks for the memories!

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

It has been almost 6 years since I saw this film, yet this film can stick with me and still offer me things.After a tragic incident of violence, a bus driver tries to find two other teen-aged survivors, a brother and sister. The sparse black and white camera work provide an insight into the bleak emotional landscape as they just stumble through as "walking dead". Having lost a father, I can identify with the characters. What is touching is the lack of communication and dialogue between the actors (whic includes the lead of the Japanese "Shall We Dance" ). Yet there is love and communication made even by just the thumping on bus walls. Words fail them.The camera work is bleak yet stunning in composition and texture. Minimal yet just enough to feel the principals trying to find meaning in life. One can also speak of the Japanese economic downturn and the resulting introspective dramatic films such as Hirokazu's "After Life". If have experienced grief or if you'd like to find some insight into it, this may be a film. It seemed shorter than the four hours, but you are forewarned.

Every once in a while I have a cinematic experience so original and compelling that it dominates the days that follow to the virtual exclusion of all else. I have had such feelings twice in recent months from Japanese cinema, first with Koreeda's wondrous "After Life" and now with Aoyama's "Eureka". Not every film that affects me in this way is a masterpiece like "After Life". Some like "The Piano Teacher" melodramatically rely on their power to disturb. I suppose "Eureka" comes somewhere between, lacking perhaps the formal perfection of a recent masterwork such as the Vietnamese "At the Height of the Summer" but enveloping me in a way that I found far more engrossing. How else to explain two viewings on consecutive days of a film of enormous length (3.5 hours) that I was never once tempted to fast forward! The answer must lie partly in the mesmerizing power of the story it tells, partly with the involvement I feel with the characters and partly in the way the director has created a highly personal vision of a complete world. Basically "Eureka" is about the traumas of three survivors of a bus hijacking, the driver and a teenaged brother and sister pair of passengers, that has resulted in the massacre of all the others involved. After a prelude depicting the cathartic event that triggered their emotion turmoil we home into their lives two years further on. The bus driver, unable to find any resolution to his mental and physical state through involvement with his own family, seeks out the youngsters whose family life has been ruined with a view to expiating his guilt as a survivor by helping them in whatever way he can. Eventually he buys a bus on which they can embark on a journey possibly to escape what has happened to them, a journey with most of the odds stacked against it as he is in failing health, a parasitic intruder has to be taken on board in the form of the teenagers' basically unsympathetic cousin and their travels take place against a disturbing background of several killings of young women. Thus after nearly two hours into "Eureka" we are experiencing a road movie with a destination so hazily defined it is hard to believe it will ever be reached. Only two of the protagonists make it to a conclusion where the soft almost sepia-toned photography suddenly bursts into colour suggesting a transforming redemption. On a first viewing I was puzzled by the denouement of the serial killings which seemed psychologically if not physiologically outlandish but I have come to accept this as one tragic consequence of trauma in a masterly work that so successfully fuses elements of great films as diverse as "L'Avventura" and "Kings of the Road" with something of the singleminded gaze of that greatest of living directors, Theo Angelopoulos.

Some people have a disliking for Japanese cinema because the movies tend to be slow paced, minimalistic. If you're one of them - skip EUREKA is all you need to know. The movie moves along at a snail's pace on Sunday - at 90 minutes most movies are just coming to their explosive and or dramatic climax, but at that point I was still wondering what Eureka was about. 2 hours later the movie finally finishes - and I was still wondering what it was all about. EUREKA is a movie of epic length, that raises other challenging questions like "Why is it 3.5 hours long?", "Why is it black and white?", "Is this all going somewhere?" and "Is it nearly finished yet?". Clearly director Shinji Aoyama wants his movie to make us think. And in 3.5 hours of black and white imagery and minimal dialogue, your mind certainly does have ample opportunity to wander. Maybe I should have checked the "Director's Statement" that is included on the UK DVD before watching the movie. Then I'd have known what he was trying to say, and could have spent my time deciding if he said it effectively instead. Whether that would have been more fun or less I don't know though. Not to say that I didn't enjoy watching EUREKA - for most of the run time I did. It's very well acted, has some good cinematography and is generally quite unusual. I'd have preferred it to have been shorter though, or had more going on - even colour photography would have helped to keep my attention on the screen with a little less effort. I do think it's a good movie though, but... it just didn't need to be 3.5 hours to make its point or build its characters. Or maybe it did need 3.5 hours to do that, but Shinji Aoyama used his time badly - because at the end I still didn't really have a grasp on who the characters were 'deep down', or what the point of sharing their story with us was. Perhaps it's just that it's a movie aimed for better minds than mine to truly appreciate though. Certainly the length and style are going to keep any hopes of mainstream appreciation at bay.

i saw this movie at 10pm at the brattle in boston. i missed my damn subway bus and i was stranded for the night. i didn't want to leave after sitting through the first 3 or so hours. i was waiting for some great ending, which never really happened. i started off mesmerized by the cinematography, but after the hours passed the plot just lost my interest. i owned jim o'rourke's eureka before seeing the movie and it was a pleasant surprise to here the title song in the movie. i read somewhere that the movie grew out of sonic youth's classic album daydream nation, i don't know. anyway it's definitely still worth seeing it.