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I came away from watching Mitsumasa Saito’s Time Slip (AKA G.I. Samurai) with mixed emotions.  On one hand, it delivers what it set out to, the mixing of two genres, the military film with the samurai genre, but on the other hand, the way the two came together left me a little cold.

The plot is relatively simple, summed up in the first sentence.  A squadron of soldiers on maneuvers begins to notice small changes, their watches stopping, the movement of Venus in the night sky, and then a trippy psychedelic light show washes over them and they find themselves not at their chosen rendezvous point, but at that same location 400 years in the past.  The group consists of a tank crew, a halftrack, a jeep and a supply truck, and they are joined by a helicopter crew and a patrol boat that turns up in the nearby ocean.

Lt. Iba (Sonny Chiba) is already at odds with Yano (Tsunehiko Watase), a member of his squad that he has some bad blood with; this situation only grows now that they find themselves outside the normal realm of things.  They are almost immediately attacked by a group of samurai, which they easily repel with their superior weapons.  They are later approached by another group of samurai, led by the ambitious Kagatori, who proves to be unafraid of these strange new warriors.  He’s much more interested in their technology.

The soldiers help Kagatori in one battle, but then try to stay out of the way of history, retreating to the beach to mull over their options.  This is where I felt the film lost my interest a little bit, in that they try to flesh out a story that doesn’t really need it, so we have the subplots of a couple of the soldiers who strike off on their own, as well as more sinister deserters who steal the patrol boat under Yano’s leadership and begin to rape and pillage the surrounding areas.  Lt. Iba is forced to destroy them, along with the boat, and then the men begin to hypothesize that if they become involved in a large enough scale, history will shunt them back to their own time to preserve the natural order of things.

Time Slip clocks in at a whopping 2 hours and 19 minutes, which felt a little long to me at times, but maybe I was just wishing it were a little shorter because of the awful pop songs that comprise the soundtrack of the film.  The dvd looks great, although the glaringly bad green screen in the climactic battle scene is just made all the more cheesy by the nice transfer.

The two disc set features a series of interviews with several cast members on the second disc of the set, three trailers for the film as well as two other trailers for films starring Sonny Chiba.

This could be one of those ‘so bad it’s good’ experiences for a lot of people, or a film worth a look for fans of Sonny Chiba or martial arts in general; I enjoyed my time with it well enough, even if I found myself peeping at the clock every now and again.

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