Rising Sun

Yet another of the movies that's been sitting on my DVR for quite some time that I finally got around to watching is Rising Sun, an interesting if extremely dated movie 30 years on.

In Los Angeles in the early 1990s, there's controversy over a struggling microprocessor manufacturer. The Nakamoto company, a Japanese keiretsu (roughly a conglomerate but not so tightly related in legal terms if I understand correctly), is trying to buy the company. There is going to be a Senate vote on whether to approve the sale, which might not go through because of national security concerns about Americans giving up their capacity to make defense-related techonology domestically. At the time the book on which the movie was made was written, Japan was rapidly growing economically, to the point that they were buying up a lot of assets in the US and Americans were worried about Japan surpassing the US. (I suppose it's not much different than the conventional wisdom around China. Japan went bust in the early 1990s, and China's economy doesn't seem to be on the firmest ground, either.)

At the same time, the Nakamoto company has built one of those fabulous new glass skyscrapers in Los Angeles, and is hosting the official grand opening for all of the local bigwigs, including Sen. Morton (Ray Wise), whose vote on the acquisition is still up in the air. Unfortunately, the party is interrupted when it's discovered that a high-priced call girl has died on the boardroom table. Interesting party.

Los Angeles police detective Webster Smith (Wesley Snipes) is called in to investigate, and he also gets a call suggesting he call on retired police captain John Connor (Sean Connery), who spent some time in Japan and knows quite a bit about Japanese cultural norms. That knowledge is going to be important not just in dealing tactfully with the Japanese, but also in getting inside the Japanese mind to try to solve the case. Connor suggests to Webster that whoever is behind the murder already seems to be a step ahead of him.

At the Nakatomo building, Connor and Smith discover that the building has an extensive security system, especially consisting of video cameras that record pretty much everything at a level of clarity that seems unrealistic for the early 1990s, and storing everything on a series of miniature laserdiscs that predate the DVD (if not the CD-ROM). The people running the building clearly know which disc contains the wanted footage, but Connor and Smith are able to get it.

Meanwhile, an autopsy suggests that the dead call girl was interested in sex involving autoerotic asphyxication, with the possibly that her death might have been an accident: whoever killed her only meant to strangle her long enough to have sex, and not long enough to kill her. But the evidence seems to point to Eddie Sakamura (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), a relatively high-level employee at Nakamoto. He tries to escape but gets killed in a car chase, his body being conveniently burned beyond recognition to the point I immediately assumed it was someone else in the car.

Worse, Connor and Smith go to an underground video processing company to learn more about the disc. There, Jingo Asakuma (Tia Carrere), an interracial woman who is the daughter of a black American Air Force officer and a Japanese mother and was more or less rejected by Japanese society for it, does a level of analysis on the disc that's patently ridiculous even when it's essayed in the various Star Trek franchises to get just the right facial recognition to advance the plot. She informs them that the data on their disc was clearly tampered with, and that Eddie probably isn't the real killer.

It goes on like this for another 50 minutes or so, also introducing a plot that Smith and his now supervisor, Tom Graham (Harvey Keitel), took a bribe in a drugs case some years back. It got dismissed by Internal Affairs, but needless to say political powerful people are going to bring it back up because they clearly don't want the real killer's identity to be released.

Some people at the time had a problem with Michael Crichton's original book Rising Sun as well as this movie adaptation on the grounds that it was too stridently anti-Japanese in presenting the Nakamotos and the threat that Americans perceived in those days. Three decades later, however, the bigger problems are the suspensions of disbelief required to advance the plot. I don't know that cameras these days are good enough to get the sort of images needed here, or more so the amount of data that needs to be stored. Smith also seems to be able to pick up on Japanese culture way too quickly.

On the whole, there's a moderately interesting mystery in Rising Sun, but it's overwhelmed by all the cultural and technological baggage. Still, I think it's an interesting time capsule of America's perception of Japan in the early 1990s.