Starring Takehito Koyasu, Miki Ito, Kenji Utsumi, Chie Koujiro, Satomi Koorogi, Osamu Hosoi, Kikuko Inoue
Directed by Tetsuo Imazawa
A very loose interpretation of Greek mythology, the title character of Hermes: Winds of Love is here imagined as the king of all ancient Greece. He’s not a god in this film, except for sometimes when he is. The same can be said for his wife Aphrodite. And yet there are actual gods roaming around as well, such as the unnamed goddess of love and the father of all the gods, who is not Zeus but someone named Ophelius (I’m sure that’s not the way it was spelled in the subtitles, but I no longer have the DVD available to check on it).
This lead to a rather bizarre film that was hard to interpret. It’s obviously neither an attempt at historical accuracy, nor at mythological accuracy. I wasn’t sure if the creators were just playing with mythology that they didn’t know much about, or if they were deliberately altering things to work for their story. After a little digging, though, it turns out that the film was produced by a group called Happy Science, which appears to be Japan’s equivalent of Scientology. Suddenly it started making sense that the film made no sense. It might also explain the random spaceship orbiting Earth that appears for about five seconds and is never seen or heard of again.
The film is too disjointed and unfocused to make a compelling narrative. The first half wants to be an action film chronicling the battle against Minos’s army and his deformed son, Minotaur. This part could have made for a good movie on its own if it were allowed to be the entire film and had the room to fill out the dramatic moments properly. But too much of it passes in rapid succession. Conflicts end too quickly to really get into them. Beyond that, most of the military battles scenes are too bland to hold my attention. The single combat scenes are much better, at least, and manage to capture some sense of dramatic weight. But they end all too quickly to get much out of them. Theseus’s battle with Minotaur should have been an epic struggle, and while what little of it there was looked pretty nice, the battle’s conclusion was rather anticlimactic and left a lot to be desired.
There’s not a lot of value to this film, and while I have seen worse I still can’t give Hermes any kind of recommendation. It’s shallow when it tries to be poignant and boring when it tries to be exciting. The interesting parts of it are shoved aside too quickly to get any enjoyment out of them. The film doesn’t deliver much of anything, so do yourself a favor and ignore it.