Lazarus (2025)
A vastly disappointing directorial return for Watanabe, so slow of a burn that it never even ignites.
Shinichiro Watanabe's Lazarus is nothing short of a disaster given the expectation, but even without the hype, it's a barely serviceable message to the world about saving itself. I'm inclined to blame Adult Swim, as I'm sure the similarities to Watanabe's magnum opus are poor executive creative decisions. Despite their now staggeringly terrible recent track record, the real nail in the coffin for Lazarus is vapid direction. The energy and animated exuberance of Watanabe's best works aren't present, and that's not in comparison to Cowboy Bebop, even if there are many surface-level similarities, but on its own merits, this show is aimless. Its premise plays into modern issues like recreational drug use, climate change, and pharmaceutical power, albeit all lightly grazed upon. In some capacity, that's the fundamental downside to the episodic approach in Lazarus, treating its thematic routes with little genuine interest. A lack of thematic integrity spans beyond just the structure and length of the series, as its primary focus seems to be an amalgamation of nostalgia and social commentary reduced to brief stints of exposition.
To understand Lazarus, it's essential that we grasp the grandiose narrative Watanabe envisions. Starting with the fictional drug Hapna that everyone decided to trip on, including the president of the US. This said drug is revealed to have a short half-life by its creator, Dr. Skinner, and will result in the death of everyone with exposure. A task force named Lazarus is developed to locate Skinner, who supposedly has the antidote, and each episode is spent searching for clues and unraveling the cast's personal baggage and the nation's political corruption. For starters, the ensemble cast has uneven screen presence, but to make matters worse, they are defined by a singular, superficial gimmick trait. Be it gender identity or status, each character is a blind caricature of their role in the team. The most heinous of the bunch is the resident hacker girl typing heaps of garbage on holographic screens, a sensationalist media trope one would think we've moved past, especially given the technologically progressive setting in Lazarus.
Misguided character writing is a major detriment, forcing the audience to phase through each episode as they discover something new, potentially solve the problem, and move on without much in the way of stakes. Watanabe seems to insist on the atmospherics of his characters, and this is arguably where the comparisons to his résumé come in. His musical and stylistic choices lean into the sleek vibes flaunted in many offbeat neo-noir attempts, but mainly Cowboy Bebop. There is an obvious emulation factor, and even if we wanted to avoid the comparison, it is inevitable considering Lazarus fails in areas its predecessor excelled in, thus begging the question of Watanabe's fidelity to the medium. The cast doesn't care enough about the repercussions of Hapna, as their search for the antidote appears to be a byproduct of their teambuilding exercise. The script, split across a few different staff, is sterile, delivering ambiguous dialogue across the board that rarely amounts to a moral quandary or revelation. Not to mention the team's shoddy motivation throughout the series is never a topic of deliberation.
Narratively, Lazarus provides the cast zero support. The episodic movements shift across politics, religious brainwashing, and AI worship. Some of its themes are better explored than others, but again, the bar is set very low. Watanabe's idea of introspection is outright stating what the viewer is looking at with a dash of context. An absence of nuance makes the series feel extremely hollow, approaching these trending discussions with no insight and creating a facade of importance in the moment before stuff gets blown up, redirecting our attention to how many days are left until Hapna extinguishes humanity. It's all painfully on-the-nose, a situation the writing puts itself in by feigning perception of a real apocalyptic state. The messages are merely diluted segments between cutting to a weekly combat sequence. Not only are the transpiring events not engaging, but Hapna's peril is something of a tall tale, and it's increasingly difficult to believe that they are unable to provide a chemical explanation of its half-life but are able to crack national firewalls by clicking "enter" a few times.
A great deal of the anticipation around Lazarus can be credited to the high watermark of its director; however, internationally, Chad Stahelski (John Wick franchise) has quite a bit of pull to his name as well. They both confirmed that Stahelski and his stunt team advised the action choreography. The general production on the series is certainly above the industry average, although not to an impressive extent. The action direction had streaks of creativity, usually employing acrobatics at the expense of displaying weight. Not all the sequences are completely fluid; particularly long-winded cuts have clunky in-between frames. The metallic color design emphasizes muted hues in mostly industrial locations, aiming to establish a cold tone. Studio Mappa's visual approach is decent, but not so much the shot composition and overly mobile camera. Ultimately, it comes down to storytelling ability, and the animation doesn't take advantage of character acting in the way it should for an intimate drama of this nature. The one saving grace is the original soundtrack featuring Kamasi Washington, Floating Points, and Bonobo, a jazz-electronic ambience boasting more than a few memorable tracks to supplement scenes where, unfortunately, nothing is happening.
Lazarus operates under the notion that the waiting game will reap the largest plot dividends, a strategy that's only successful when the audience knows what we're waiting for. The ragtag team's lore is a mundane series of flashbacks, and some of them aren't privy to that much either. Audiovisually, Watanabe orchestrates an action shot or two that may be clipped and circulated around the internet for potentially years without anyone acknowledging the source as valuable consumption. The glacial pace loses attention because there are no story threads that weave through the narrative or characters; much of it is akin to one-off fun facts about the cast. It's a shame that the thematic repertoire doesn't bloom into a compelling piece about the modern world and our self-destructiveness. Lazarus is a vastly disappointing directorial return for Watanabe, so slow of a burn that it never even ignites.
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