The Human Trust is one of the oddest films I’ve watched in quite some time. I couldn’t easily sum it up, and certainly not with a “good” or “bad”.
The Human Trust is a Japanese film, and it opens with scenes set in the dying days of World War II, as an Imperial Army officer explains why he’s making off with a secret gold reserve. So far, so good, but the hint we’re in for something unusual is when he begins explaining fiat currency and shadowy market manipulators like the buggiest of gold bugs.
From there we meander through a bizarre amalgam of conspiracy theories, heist movies, and a kind of updated-for-the-millenium OLPC in the form of a PDA, the mass production of which will, apparently, save the entire world.
If you’re confused reading this, imagine how confused I was watching it. If you want to watch it spoiler-free, you may want to stop here.
The core plot is pretty straightforward: The M Trust was cooked up after WW II as a secret investment fund for the betterment of the world in general and Japan in particular. Trading with US powerbrokers the trust evolves into an economic spearhead for Japan, then ultimately degenerates into a normal investment fund, sloshing money around largely at the behest of CIA puppetmasters.
One of the younger scions of the Japanese families who have nominally controlled the fund wants to make it into a universal aid organisation to redeem the world. To this end, he sends his intermediary - a third-world ubermensch from a fictional third-world East Asian nation who fills the “magic negro” role - to negotiate for the assistant of the protagonist, a scam artist. He will help steal the M Trust funds, use it to fund the development of a ruggedised Internet capable PDA, which in turn will create a universal connectedness which will save the world.
On the way there are scam ops, counter-operations from the badass secret agents working for the M Trust, some sort of pseudo-police officer, and the CIA paymaster (who sounds spookily like the Sloth Demon character from Just Cause 2). Along with random other utopian/conspiracy plot points stirred in.
Even at the end of this piece I’m honestly still not sure what I thought of the film. It’s incoherant and nutjobby, like being stuck at a table with a goldbug, a Dunning-Krugerrand, Nicholas Negroponte, and half a dozen uni students who’ve just discovered the distribution of wealth ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. But… I didn’t hate it. I watched all two and some hours, and didn’t regret it.