“My hope is that the world won’t be destroyed.”

Justin’s rating: I daydream better than this

Justin’s review: One red flag that tells me that I’ve stumbled into an arthouse film is when there’s gobs of abstract symbolism, a priority on shot composition over coherent storytelling, and a rapid retreat from having to clearly explain anything.

These movies are designed to seem deep but serve to infuriate me. Have symbolism, be weird, fine — but make sense. I’m not giving you two hours of my life for you to dump your dream journal on me and claim to be a genius.

The Dimension Travelers felt like one of these surreal journeys, what with so many strange moments and context-free transitions. Yet there may be a nugget of genuine scifi creativity at play.

Midori (Chiharu Niiyama) is a bored Japanese high schooler who befriends a new alien-looking transfer named Mayumi (Yasue Sato). Mayumi is a little strange, especially when she tells everyone that her greatest hope is that the world won’t end. It turns out that she has good cause for this, because she’s been flipping between different dimensions where the apocalypse keeps happening.

When Mayumi’s initial home got nuked (by a falling satellite, apparently), she started surfing the wave of dimensions and found herself being accepted by Midori’s world. Mayumi teaches Midori how to hop into other worlds we well. She probably shouldn’t have done that, because Midori starts unintentionally moving back and forth between worlds, including one where she’s committed to an asylum or one that’s deep in war.

The general concept of dimensional nomads fleeing from multiple apocalypses has a lot of potential, especially as it makes the audience worried for any world in which they arrive. But any focused narrative is buried deep, deep beneath a dreamlike presentation where stuff just keeps happening and only rarely is it explained. Behind it all is something about a rebel movement against an Orwellian organization called “The Castle” that’s trying to control the world.

It’s intentionally hard to get your mental footing in this film. At any moment, you don’t know if this is reality, a different world, or figments of someone’s warped imagination. One interpretation here is that Midori is a mental patient who’s escaping into her own fragmented mind. Or she’s a potential fighting force for good. Or she’s writing personal fanfic, I don’t know.

Based on the novel by Taku Mayumura and tackled by Perfect Blue’s screenwriter, The Dimension Travelers is more of an experience than a story. If you can be patient for a slow first half and trance out with this flick, maybe there’s some scifi flavor to enjoy. But I wasn’t having it. The dubbing is absolutely atrocious, the pacing painful, and the explanations about as coherent as listening to my youngest son describe an epic story he made up.

Before you read this review, I’m willing to bet you didn’t know what The Dimension Travelers was. Perhaps it’s best if you return to that state of ignorance.

Intermission!

• “Rika: The head monkey on monkey hill.”
• Finger guns can be lethal in the mind
• “My hope is that the world won’t be destroyed.”
• That’s a lot of pressed flowers in books
• Hey, she’s reading Lord of the Rings! Good on her.
• Watch out for the control rays
• What’s a “capable?”
• No, kid, you can’t bring an animal back to life by transferring body heat
• The graveyard of the lost memories
• The castle of pleasure? What does any of this mean?
• “Koichi. Drop dead.”
• Everyone’s just gone now, that’s creepy
• So now we can just make up whole worlds with our minds?
• “Haberdasher” is not nearly as cool of a nickname as you think it is