Bullet Point Review: Alice in Borderland

Also known in romaji as ‘Imawa no Kuni no Arisu’.

Mild Spoilers…

• My feelings on Netflix’s Alice in Borderland are spilt into two exact halves. I thoroughly loved and enjoyed episodes one to four but episodes five to eight left me feeling a little…underwhelmed. Due to my inherent love for mystery stories, I take partial blame for feeling that way, but the shift to the Beach in the second half, with its executives, secret meetings and power games, left me yearning for the initial episodic games that Arisu Ryohei (a superb Yamazaki Kento) participates in and solves. After a very unnecessary blood bath, the last episode does bounce back, with the spotlight returning on Arisu to solve the last game and setup a new conflict for the upcoming second season.
• Making live-action adaptations are always a tall order to fill. How exactly do you replicate a fictional world, complete with its own unique geography, eccentric costumes, hairstyles, creatures, into reality with conviction? Not to mention that the source material would have been in print for years, composed of multiple volumes and have garnered a dedicated fanbase. So, most live-action adaptations are met with scepticism and even if they do well, are often nit-picked and compared to the original.
  In Japan however, manga adaptations are a staple; Tokyo Ghoul, Full Metal Alchemist, Bleach, Attack on Titan, Gintama, Jojo’s Bizzare Adventure, Kids on the Slope, March comes in like a Lion, are some of the names that come to mind. But these are all movies, (there are dramas too, but most of the popular mangas are adapted into movies than tv shows) and movies are at a higher risk when compiling years of plot and character development into a two hour runtime. I am not versed with Haro Aso’s original manga, so I can’t comment on the changes made in the live-action, but choosing to make Alice in Borderland a series, rather than a movie was an excellent decision! A longer runtime gives the makers time to lay the groundwork and establish the characters and setting, without having to rely on the audience’s prior knowledge from the source material to make sense of things. As someone who went into the show uninitiated, I am glad to say that I never once felt lost nor did I feel the need to Google anything in relation to the show.
• Alice in Borderland moves swiftly. It gets to the point fast. It doesn’t waste time with needless exposition (I was surprised at how the rules/problems of the new world were conveyed through sight and action rather than dialogue; it prevented the drama from turning clunky) and doesn’t linger anywhere except for the required moments of intensity. In the introduction scene, a tight fifteen minutes, we are able to gain insight into Arisu’s, Karube’s (Machida Keita) and Chota’s (Morinaga Yuki) friendship, their jobs (or lack of) and their general discontentment with their lives. In the next fifteen minutes, they have already crossed over to Borderland and are playing their first game.

• The series is really well acted — Kento Yamazaki is joined by an athletic Tsuchiya Tao as Usagi Yuzuha, Murakami Nijiro as the mysterious Chishiya Shuntaro and Asahina Aya as Kuina Hikari — and the tight screenplay, coupled with a dynamic cinematography and great action sequences create for an immersing watch. The wide shots that repeatedly showcase a dark, deserted Tokyo, especially the Shibuya crossing (one of the world’s busiest pedestrian crossing, but sadly having already witnessed empty city streets during lockdown last year, it didn’t have the impact that it was probably intended to give), emphasize the apocalyptic world our characters are stuck in. It looks like home but doesn’t feel like home.
• I didn’t catch onto many of the references to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, but this list complies the Japanese counterparts to the novel, while this review explains the parallels to the country’s current social issues.