Take story elements from Twelve Monkeys, Mission: Impossible, Terminator, Transformers, Matrix, E.T., and a few more Hollywood sci-fi hits, mix them together, give them to a Japanese director with a decent budget, and the result will probably look a lot like Returner.

Returner concerns a young woman, Milly, who comes back from the future with barely enough time to assassinate a newly-arrived alien being, before his race can start a decades-long war that eventually ends, in her own time, with the destruction of the human race. She immediately meets up with Miyamoto, an adventurer of some sort, who has his own agenda: to kill the scum who killed his friend years ago, and has been trafficking in children’s organs since that time. Before long, both heroes discover their real enemy is the same person: Mizoguchi, a ruthless criminal who kidnaps the alien and his powerful spaceship.

Returner was a lot of fun. By the descriptions I’d read, I thought it was going to be much more solemn than it was – more like Matrix or the Terminator films in their dead-seriousness. I should have realized that the Japanese are allowed to have more fun with their filmmaking, and this is the result of a decent director with a good budget and a talented special-effects crew. The cast is good, too: Goro Kishitani as the villain Mizoguchi is especially appealing in all his vileness.

Returner isn’t perfect. Certain bits of it are too sentimental for my tastes. The director, Takashi Yamazaki, seems to want to linger too long on hand-holding and eye-gazing, as well as on the Spielbergian wonder of alien spacecraft and their inhabitants. Still, he doesn’t take the project too seriously, so he – and we – can have fun with it. There’s plenty of action and the plot – though straightforward – has enough interesting twists and elements so that it doesn’t become entirely predictable.

This has recently been released on DVD to American consumers by Columbia/Tristar, and the disc is great. Nice audio, crystal-clear video, and a few extra features. It makes a nice addition to one’s collection.