UK Release Date: 04-05-2009
Price: £19.99
UK Certificate: 15
Director: Yukihiko Tsutsumi
Country: Japan
Distributor: 4Digital Asia

20th Century Boys is the first of a trilogy based on a hugely popular manga. It performed well at the Japanese box office, luckily for the producers, given the record-breaking spend of six billion yen over the three films. Considering this epic expenditure, the special effects are disappointingly pedestrian. Inspired by the T-Rex track of the same name, it’s the tale of a gang of kids who go their own ways as they grow up, but are reunited when a series of catastrophes echo a doomsday scenario they invented as kids and committed to a ‘Book of Prophecies’. With more depth than your average sci-fi flick, 20th Century Boys considers the scars left by childhood meanness, and the tempering of dreams and rock and roll rebellion by the responsibilities of adulthood; it also has a reason­ably sympathetic lead in put-upon cornershop worker Kenji, and a suitably spooky cult led by a man in a mask. But the story is slow to develop, and Westerners unfamiliar with the manga might struggle to make it through to the giant robot payoff.