Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem

I just came back from a special screening of Interstella 5555 that was remastered with AI. It was bad. Real bad. This specific critique will cover the re-release and the original release by Mr. Matsumoto, as I have never had a chance to really cover Interstella 5555 nor Daft Punk specifically anywhere around these parts of town. It should be no secret to anyone here—nobody before or after has ever come close to what Daft Punk were able to achieve and unlock with their mastery over the ethereal quality of music.

It was a long time I watched Interstella 5555, where at the time, I didn’t even know who Leiji Matsumoto was; all happened way before I got to know his magnum opus works such as Space Battleship Yamato and Galaxy Express 999 (of which I have a massive original release poster from Japan in a wooden frame from my friend). Somehow I happened to see it around the time when Random Access Memories had juts come out and it left some very special sort of imprint within me that I have never really been able to scrub off—not that I ever wanted to.

As much as I am hopelessly obsessed over Random Access Memories, nothing really beats Discovery when it comes something calling my heart its home so effortlessly. I will wholly blame it on the movie. Speaking of it, seeing it in theaters on the big screen was a real treat. I have actually forgotten the nuances of the story—which ended up being literally 1000x better than whatever was coming out in recent times, like Gladiator 2, I suppose. The music, just like Interstella 5555 showed is something otherworldly. Unbelievable, almost, that we have this caliber of soul striking hot in today’s times.

The most unfortunate part of the whole 4K screening, which was sold as a “the only day in December when you can watch it” was the utter and sheer lack of quality and disrespect to the source material. Some artifacts of AI-upscaling were straight out of horror movies. One guy’s mouth in the audience looked all stitched up, some sort of a torturous scene to look at. EVERY single background character, god, even whenever ANY of the main focus characters moved a little bit into the background—their faces would become all smudged, eyes melting into their cheeks, glasses taking over their entire faces, and other unpleasant things that take you out of the once-in-a-lifetime experience.

“Look what they did to my boy” is the best way I can describe the absolute massacre we all witnessed together, in a sold out theater. The 90s-style animation—even if the original came out in 2003—had that inexplicable yet soft and inviting charm, just like Galaxy Express 999, where it would have been better to play the movie as is, in its 240p quality; I would not have asked for anything more than that. The whole experience left me puzzled. Outerwordly music and story paired with awful and distracting visuals left an unidentified taste in my mouth, which I wouldn’t want anybody else getting exposed to.

A nice surprise after the screening was a reel of all their classic music videos, such as: Da Funk, Around the World, Burnin', Fresh, and Infinity Repeating (one of my all-time favorites, crazy to think it was a Demo just chilling on someone’s desk for the better part of the decade). Seeing all their hits on the big screen was such a nice and an unexpected treat that I left happy and eager to talk to my friends about the whole experience. That’s the world I like to use for Daft Punk—experience. Something About Us is one of the stepping stones that helped me to transfrom from a mere boy to who I am today, as I lived through my first big and real heartbreak whilst listening to it at night in my dark college room, only to be lit by a tiny lamp—living through the feelings that have never come to be. Memories that never got a chance to be.