[REVIEW] Galileo
Title: Galileo
Genre: Quirky crime
Episodes: 10, + 1 SP, + 1 movie
Cast: Fukuyama Masaharu, Shibasaki Kou, Kitamura Kazuki, Maya Miki
Plot: Plucky female rookie cop teams up with eccentric genius physicist to solve crime that can't be explained by anyone without a doctorate.
If you've ever seen the US series 'Numb3rs', you can substitute physics for maths and pretend that Don's a girl, and you might get something approximating 'Galileo'. Or maybe not.
Utsumi Kaoru (Shibasaki Kou) suffers from the typical plight of the female rookie cop in a Japanese drama - she's not taken seriously by her superiors, her instincts are ignored, and if any of the higher-ups need a cup of coffee you can bet they'll ask her to make it. Utsumi refuses to let this stand in the way of her quest for justice. Actually, she won't let anything stand in her way, be it a locked door, a silent suspect, or an airtight alibi. She's got guts, courage and determination.
What she doesn't have is a physics degree, which is where her senpai Kusanagi (Kitamura) steps in. Or rather, his friend from university does. Kusanagi's a pretty nice guy but he's nothing unusual. The same cannot be said for Yukawa Manabu (Fukuyama), a man so eccentric he's nicknamed 'henjin Galileo' (basically, "weirdo" Galileo). Yukawa would be quite a catch (tall, handsome, brilliant, good at sports, never at a loss for words) if he weren't so darned frustrating to talk to. He's got a one-track mind, and that track is SCIENCE. If it's not rational, logical, and can be explained by science, it's not his domain.
Utsumi and Yukawa are a reversed Mulder and Scully with more insults and better music. (The OST is gorgeous!) That is, if Scully was prone to scribbling down equations on anything that came to hand (doors, cars, sand), and Mulder engaged in bouts of girl talk with the coroner (Maya Miki) when the frustration overwhelmed him. Our heroes bicker at every turn, and even convincing Yukawa to help each episode requires Utsumi to find some angle of the case that will appeal to his sense of curiosity. If he doesn't find it interesting, he won't help, simple as that. His assistant and students get roped in as well, some under protest, as Yukawa plays with lasers, blows things up, and generally does whatever it takes to push the boundaries of physics, sanity and common sense in order to solve the mystery.
They have a very strange relationship, these two. Occasionally it borders on flirtatious, but more often than not Yukawa treats Utsumi like a child or puppy, perhaps. It's not often he sees her as a mature adult in her own right - though to be fair, she doesn't always act like one and he tends to be dismissive towards his intellectual inferiors anyway, no matter how good their intuition might be. She, in turn, treats him like some sort of cure-all superhero - whatever the mystery, Yukawa-sensei can solve it. They do become friends of a sort, though. Not the kind who hang out socially, but the kind who can trust each other even when they shouldn't. I like that kind better.
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The Galileo SP takes place three years before the series, and explores the first case in which Detective Kusanagi called upon Yukawa for help. But there's also a series of flashbacks to the first case which Yukawa solved for Kusanagi, back in their student days, in which the young Yukawa is played to perfection by Miura Haruma.
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The movie takes place after the series, and is actually nothing like it, after the first five minutes. It's slow-paced, probably focuses more on Tsutsumi Shinichi's character than Yukawa and Utsumi, and at times I wondered how exactly science came into it. But it was also very sweet and moving, making me tearful at the end. The set-up is quite unusual: we see the crime being committed, and we know who the perpetrators are, but all the evidence says they can't have done it. The trick is not to solve the murder, but to prove it. I will be honest and say that this movie absolutely broke my heart but I recommend it anyway.
Genre: Quirky crime
Episodes: 10, + 1 SP, + 1 movie
Cast: Fukuyama Masaharu, Shibasaki Kou, Kitamura Kazuki, Maya Miki
Plot: Plucky female rookie cop teams up with eccentric genius physicist to solve crime that can't be explained by anyone without a doctorate.
If you've ever seen the US series 'Numb3rs', you can substitute physics for maths and pretend that Don's a girl, and you might get something approximating 'Galileo'. Or maybe not.
Utsumi Kaoru (Shibasaki Kou) suffers from the typical plight of the female rookie cop in a Japanese drama - she's not taken seriously by her superiors, her instincts are ignored, and if any of the higher-ups need a cup of coffee you can bet they'll ask her to make it. Utsumi refuses to let this stand in the way of her quest for justice. Actually, she won't let anything stand in her way, be it a locked door, a silent suspect, or an airtight alibi. She's got guts, courage and determination.
What she doesn't have is a physics degree, which is where her senpai Kusanagi (Kitamura) steps in. Or rather, his friend from university does. Kusanagi's a pretty nice guy but he's nothing unusual. The same cannot be said for Yukawa Manabu (Fukuyama), a man so eccentric he's nicknamed 'henjin Galileo' (basically, "weirdo" Galileo). Yukawa would be quite a catch (tall, handsome, brilliant, good at sports, never at a loss for words) if he weren't so darned frustrating to talk to. He's got a one-track mind, and that track is SCIENCE. If it's not rational, logical, and can be explained by science, it's not his domain.
Utsumi and Yukawa are a reversed Mulder and Scully with more insults and better music. (The OST is gorgeous!) That is, if Scully was prone to scribbling down equations on anything that came to hand (doors, cars, sand), and Mulder engaged in bouts of girl talk with the coroner (Maya Miki) when the frustration overwhelmed him. Our heroes bicker at every turn, and even convincing Yukawa to help each episode requires Utsumi to find some angle of the case that will appeal to his sense of curiosity. If he doesn't find it interesting, he won't help, simple as that. His assistant and students get roped in as well, some under protest, as Yukawa plays with lasers, blows things up, and generally does whatever it takes to push the boundaries of physics, sanity and common sense in order to solve the mystery.
They have a very strange relationship, these two. Occasionally it borders on flirtatious, but more often than not Yukawa treats Utsumi like a child or puppy, perhaps. It's not often he sees her as a mature adult in her own right - though to be fair, she doesn't always act like one and he tends to be dismissive towards his intellectual inferiors anyway, no matter how good their intuition might be. She, in turn, treats him like some sort of cure-all superhero - whatever the mystery, Yukawa-sensei can solve it. They do become friends of a sort, though. Not the kind who hang out socially, but the kind who can trust each other even when they shouldn't. I like that kind better.
----------------
The Galileo SP takes place three years before the series, and explores the first case in which Detective Kusanagi called upon Yukawa for help. But there's also a series of flashbacks to the first case which Yukawa solved for Kusanagi, back in their student days, in which the young Yukawa is played to perfection by Miura Haruma.
----------------
The movie takes place after the series, and is actually nothing like it, after the first five minutes. It's slow-paced, probably focuses more on Tsutsumi Shinichi's character than Yukawa and Utsumi, and at times I wondered how exactly science came into it. But it was also very sweet and moving, making me tearful at the end. The set-up is quite unusual: we see the crime being committed, and we know who the perpetrators are, but all the evidence says they can't have done it. The trick is not to solve the murder, but to prove it. I will be honest and say that this movie absolutely broke my heart but I recommend it anyway.