[vulgarshudder]

Fukasaku Kinji died during filming of BR2, his son took over and used his notes (he obviously knew he wasn't going to make the end of filming), so I think it's VERY much what Kinji envisioned.

I think BR2 is a very good film in that Kinji's themes ('terror', 'war', 'the next generation') are in response to 9/11 on a very personal level, and not many people are willing to take on that subject.

The collapsing towers are punctuating the trauma of 9/11, much like the shots of the Hiroshima Dome throughout the War Without Morality series bringing it back to the origins of the trauma of the post-defeat era.

Here's a quote from the film journal Kinema Junpo from his son:

"More than the public controversy about the rights and wrongs of the justifications for retaliation, he talked about it on a more personal level. It was the question of the hatred he had felt for american when he was young. And at this time I think this question once again boiled up."

The film is proposing that the humanist myth of 'connectedness' (nakama)(the reconstituted family group of young surviors) can redeem youth from the moral void of postmodernist 'post tragic' techno-survival-game landscape of contemporary global politics.

I hope that's the case.