If you’ve lived in Japan, visited or just spend unhealthy amounts of time on Instagram, it doesn’t take long to realize that something about “Bullet Train” is a bit off. David Leitch’s garish, hyper-violent comedy follows Brad Pitt and a bevy of contract killers on a high-speed shinkansen journey from Tokyo to Kyoto. Only it doesn’t seem to be happening in Japan at all.

Stick around for the end credits and you can catch the movie’s big reveal: It was actually filmed on a Sony backlot in California. Produced at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, “Bullet Train” never even got a chance to alight in the country where it’s supposed to take place.

Instead, the movie’s art department concocted an ersatz, knock-off version, using the odd composite image of Tokyo and Kyoto but otherwise working with a free — and sometimes sloppy — hand. The production employed the same immersive LED wall technology used on the sci-fi series “The Mandalorian,” which feels appropriate: These are both fantasies.

In a recent interview with GQ, Leitch described the film’s setting as “a wish-fulfillment version, a graphic novel version of Japan and the bullet train itself.” In practice, this translates into a peculiar mulch of East Asian aesthetics that bears only occasional resemblance to the real thing.

There are yakuza, electric toilets, vending machines, a ubiquitous anime character named Momomon and a whole lot of neon, but few of the bespoke touches that made a movie such as Wes Anderson’s “Isle of Dogs” such a delight.

The train whizzes through computer-generated landscapes with the generic feel of video game backgrounds. The signage contains multiple typos. One of the only specific cultural quirks in the production design — that all the Japanese characters use old-school “Galapagos phones” rather than smartphones — is about a decade out of date.

On the other hand, some of the movie’s modifications are welcome: Who hasn’t wished that the shinkansen came with its own cocktail lounge?

In a way, it’s nice to see a major Hollywood production treat Japan with so little reverence. “Bullet Train” doesn’t succumb to the solemnity that infected recent films such as “Earthquake Bird” and “The Outsider” (or, for that matter, “Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins”). You’d have to go all the way back to 2002’s “Austin Powers in Goldmember” to find a movie that’s quite so unconcerned about getting the details right.

Were it not for the fact that it’s based on a novel by Japanese author Kotaro Isaka, it could really have taken place anywhere. Isaka seemed to admit as much in a recent interview with the New York Times in which he downplayed the story’s cultural context and said he’d always thought it would make a good Hollywood flick.

“Maybe they’re not even Japanese,” Isaka said of the book’s characters, later adding: “I don’t have any feeling of wanting people to understand Japanese literature or culture.” Well, not much risk of that happening here.

While “Bullet Train” is an extreme example, there’s nothing unusual about Hollywood visions of Japan being conjured off-site. Movie productions will typically fly in to shoot their exterior locations, then decamp to another country that’s more convenient or has better tax incentives.

The epic battles in “The Last Samurai” were staged on the plains of New Zealand; “The Sea of Trees” used Massachusetts as a stand-in for the infamous Aokigahara Jukai “suicide forest.” In one particularly memorable sequence of “The Wolverine,” a fracas at Tokyo’s Zojoji Temple spills over into the Chinese Garden of Friendship in Sydney.

“Bullet Train” may suggest otherwise, but there have in fact been some discernible improvements over the years. Hollywood productions are now a little more careful about treating Asian actors as interchangeable (think of China’s Zhang Ziyi and Gong Li helming the cast of “Memoirs of a Geisha” in 2005), and may think twice before casting white actors in what were originally Japanese roles.

Subtitled Japanese dialogue is also becoming more common, bringing with it opportunities to hear Hollywood’s finest make an absolute hash of the language (“Kate” star Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Bryan Cranston of “Godzilla,” take a bow!).

Still, it will be interesting to see what comes of director Chad Stahelski’s recent suggestion that his forthcoming Ghost of Tsushima adaptation might be shot entirely in Japanese. Others have gone down that path before — see Clint Eastwood’s “Letters from Iwo Jima” and Paul Schrader’s “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters” for two superior examples — and paid the price at the U.S. box office.

Casting opportunities are opening up, if only a little. Actors fluent in both English and Japanese are slowly breaking the stranglehold enjoyed by Ken Watanabe, Hiroyuki Sanada, Tadanobu Asano and Rinko Kikuchi. No disrespect to any of them, but I’m looking forward to seeing more of the likes of Takehiro Hira (“Giri/Haji”), Shioli Kutsuna (“Deadpool 2”) and Sanada’s “Bullet Train” co-star, Andrew Koji, in the future.

On the other hand, there seem to be fewer Hollywood filmmakers bringing a distinctive vision to their tales of Japan. Martin Scorsese’s “Silence” (which was actually filmed in Taiwan) and Anderson’s “Isle of Dogs” (which, er, was a stop-motion animation) are perhaps the only examples from the past decade that will endure. Some of the best portrayals have instead been found on the small screen, in TV series “Giri/Haji,” “Tokyo Vice” and “Pachinko.”

In retrospect, the 2000s were a high-water mark. Heavyweight directors had ventured here before — including Sydney Pollack (“The Yakuza”) and Ridley Scott (“Black Rain”) — but that was no preparation for the sudden glut of movies during the decade, from “The Last Samurai” to “Kill Bill: Vol. 1,” “Lost in Translation” to “Enter the Void,” And did I mention “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift”? We definitely can’t forget that one.

These were the films that travelers often had in mind when they booked their flights to Japan. I’m not convinced “Bullet Train” will have the same galvanizing effect. But if it does inspire people to visit when international tourism finally resumes in earnest, they should be easy to spot: They’ll be the ones complaining that the real-life shinkansen doesn’t have a bar.

“Bullet Train” opens in theaters in Japan on Sept. 1. For more information, visit bullettrain-movie.jp.