The low-budget slightly cyberpunk dystopia of Wolf Gramm is interesting not for its content, but rather for the presence in the frame of Fassbinder, who had almost nothing left to live on our sinful planet, which, in fact, confirms his appearance in the film: Fassbinder, of course, is in terrible physical shape for his 37 years. However, overcomes this form absolutely kitsch leopard "suit" super detective from the near gloomy future, where, in fact, all harmful to health (for example, alcohol) is prohibited, which in parallel does not prevent all this successfully use.
Seriously, the genre patterns of this film are clear. They stretch from noir to antinoir. The symbolic budget of the film eventually played a positive role and led to the symbolism of a dissonant combination of ruined-squatted spaces of the metropolis with impeccable shining lines of high-tech architecture. The inhabitants of the first topos should have nothing in common with the owners of the second, but in the film there is a number of agents working for the megacorporation and at the same time constituting a conditional underground, which seems to be an underground not in fact, but one of the subprojects of the megacorporation in order to create an effect of cognitive dissonance, which is designed to blur a clear opposition to power and dissent, which, by the way, allows to prolong the state of dystopia for a long time. It doesn’t look like 89 years old Germany, but rather our world today. Fassbinder’s hero is tricter-like, he easily moves from topos to topos, seemingly performing his police function, but at the same time unobtrusively reflecting, which leads him not to fall out of the system (this would give a very recognizable contours of modernist dystopia), but to a systemic failure in thinking and a guess about the true cause of the civilizational impasse.
The point, of course, is not consumerism and hedonism, these are effects, not causes. I venture to assume that the explanation of the world that has developed in this film is the global rejection of the cosmic intention of mankind. Then it becomes clear why the “horizontal” ideal of humanity associated with the flourishing of media communications, the dominant online show, etc., is a global dead end, and not a temporary failure in the program. The world of “Kamikaze 1989” is already almost matrix, but at the time of the film’s creation, virtual technologies were not perceived as so powerful that on the basis of this idea, some excellent blockbuster would turn out. In this case, it turned out made almost on the knee underground film about the fact that the future has already come, but there is absolutely nothing to do in it.