Sci-fi and Fantasy Movies and Series Reviews, Part 32

Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV
Nyx Ulric and the Kingsglaive, the special forces of King Regis, protect the kingdom of Lucis and its crown city, Insomnia, from the attacks and deceptions Emperor Iedolas Aldercapt and his military empire, Niflheim. That’s too many unusual proper names for a one-sentence summary, but whatever, because the movie was damn good. I want to attribute it the fact that Hollywood had nothing to do with it, at least officially. Visual Works, the film-ish subdivision of the video game producer Square Enix from Japan, and they seem fairly immune to artistic influence from any western corporate interests that may have a stake in them. It shows on many levels, but I think most strongly with the characterizations. A king, to secure the safety of his realm, agrees to a treaty with a foreign power and doesn’t scheme to undermine the aggressor beforehand to give the Big Bad the what’s for. A soldier, foreign to the land he protects, yet granted magical weaponry by its ruling king, doesn’t navel-gaze about returning to his homeland or getting revenge on the occupying forces. A duty-bound princess puts herself in great danger to accomplish a mission and doesn’t karate chop men twice her size or make snarky comments about royal life. Now: yes, I get the idea of characters acting out of their type to make them interesting, but there has to be nuance to that. Put these characters in the hands of some L.A. hack and this movie would’ve been rewritten into something forgettable or repulsive. Quick note about the state of human-realistic CGI: it’s getting pretty ridiculous.

Final Fantasy XV
The honorably exiled Prince Noctis Lucius Caelum road trips (bro’adtrips?) with three friends and deals with the aftermath of his home city of Insomnium being sacked by Emperor Aldercapt of Niflheim. Yes, it’s a video game, but finally finally finally we get a story involving an arranged marriage—arranged by an enemy monarch, no less—that doesn’t involve a bride who wants to “follow her heart’s true love,” or a dopey, unloveable groom. Granted, the lucky couple already had a good history together as children, but the fact remains. This plot point plays into the larger theme of the will of God/the gods being inescapable. You can play along or fight it, but the end result will come to pass; none of this humanist, defying fate through sheer will poopytalk. Your ass is getting in line, no matter what. Multigenerational guilt and redemption, a revenge-driven antagonist with an understandable motive, no woke schoolmarm tut-tutting. And finally, the marriage does happen, but in a nicely tragic (?) way.

Avalon (2001)
A loner, highly-skilled virtual reality gamer learns about a mysterious game character and the secret high-risk, high-reward mission. The director, Mamoru Oshii, was the guy behind the original (and superb) Ghost in the Shell (1995), and the storytelling parallels are obvious. It felt a bit like Stalker, maybe because of the overwhelming sepia tone and the Eastern Bloc dystopia setting. The odd special effects took me out of the story sometimes, though after a while I realize it’s the in-game VR, so I get why it all looks a little janky. This isn’t something I’d go out of my way to watch again, but it’s better than most other films of this type.

Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro
Professional thief Lupin and his partner are embroiled in a plot by Count Cagliostro to marry the princess of the region and acquire her family’s treasure. This was one of Hiyao Miyazaki’s directed films, and you can tell from the animation, but also the personality of the legacy characters. Lupin is more innocently mischievous than a scumbag, and the deuteragonists are a slightly different than their manga counterparts. Anyways, the car chase and rescue scene is famous for a reason; no CGI was harmed during its making. It still floors me that so much detail was hand-drawn, complete with the typical Miyazakian detail to mechanical design and complete disregard for practical physics. One of the original movie posters is completely bonkers and it gives one a good idea of the actual genre.

Iria: Zeiram the Animation
A novice bounty hunter searches for the strange monster that killed her mentor and brother. You can watch the whole series (only 6 episodes) here. This came before Trigun and Cowboy Bebop, but somehow everything about it came off like it copied the both of them and didn’t turn out quite as well as either. Everything about Iria was consistently a notch or two below in quality, and I’d expect it to be on par with Trigun and Bebop, given its high rating and being released in the same era of anime. Though the subbed version is better, I saw the dubbed version and the voice acting performances ranged from okay to really awkward. The subtitling (I usually have those on) had some strange narration: “futuristic gun fires,” “futuristic engine roars,” “futuristic hoagie feasted upon.” That might’ve been just Amazon Prime Video being weird. There’s two live action movies made around the same time, Zeiram and Zeiram 2, that look too ridiculous for me to bother with.

Oxygen
A woman wakes up in a cryogenic pod and has no memory of how she got there. This had great potential, but the logistics had so many holes, I don’t even know where to begin, but bear with me on the following nonsense. One of the biggest issues was the rapidly declining oxygen levels inside the protagonist’s cryo-pod, a lynchpin factor to move the plot forward. M.I.L.O., the ship’s AI, should have known it could transfer oxygen from the other pods to Omicron-267’s pod; his job was literally to keep the pod occupants safe. As soon as the asteroid hit and pods’ occupants started getting killed, and when Omicron-267 started sucking all her pod’s oxygen, he could’ve started that process…no administrative code should be needed for that. For that matter, as soon as Omicron-267 woke up, he should’ve immediately put her back into hibernation. There was no indication that M.I.L.O. was malfunctioning and couldn’t do his job, or that he was so badly programmed that he completely overlooked obvious solutions. Fixing M.I.L.O. would mean the story doesn’t happen, though, so the better idea is to make M.I.L.O. intentionally “malfunction” or not do these things by design, because Elizabeth Hansen planned it that way. The asteroid collision could still happen as the film’s one allowable freak coincidence, but it’s not needed for this. Let’s say Elizabeth Hansen had something to do with her clone’s pod’s M.I.L.O. instance, where she allowed. Elizabeth wanted her clone to wake up in mid-journey for a reason, and the clone had to piece together her mission from the fragments of Liz’s memories she inherited, as she does in the movie as it is. I don’t know what reason that could be; maybe there was some foul play Liz discovered with the ship’s course that would lead to every occupant’s death, and with Omicron-267 waking up and fixing it after the flight started is the only way. I don’t know, but the way the story’s logic is configured is too unbelievable.

Child of Kamiari Month
A schoolgirl has to collect and deliver chiso food for the annual gathering of the gods at Izumo, in the hopes of seeing her dead mother again. This one grew on me, but it took a bit. I thought it started off with belabored exposition—we don’t need a series of scenes demonstrating how much of a normal schoolgirl Kanna is. Not even 30 seconds is required for that. The English voice acting (the Japanese version wasn’t loading on Netflix) was okay, but felt a too juvenile/Pokémon-ish for me. It picks up for me in the early-middle of the second act, when Kanna seems to really start openly addressing her grief and perceived guilt in the death of her mother. The loss of a parent from a child’s perspective doesn’t seem to be treated with seriousness in films until an adult enters the picture and directs them, which doesn’t happen here. This leads me to believe the story is allegorical to Kanna’s internal struggle in reconciling her divinely-appointed mission, with dealing with loss, her part in the loss, and abandoning false coping substitutes and expectations. The final meeting with the gods was handled nicely, and atypically, knowing why Kanna was really there. Another great promotional poster.

Heaven Official’s Blessing
A popular prince works to pay back his debt after ascending and destroying some heavenly property. This was my first Chinese anime donghua. It was good, but I think I’d need a rewatch of the final six episodes, which held the last of Xie Lan’s “assignments.” The animation itself didn’t seem too different than anime, but a lot of the communication, political protocol, and views of the supernatural was based on imperial China. It had a je ne sais quoi about the dialog that marked it as a wholly separate world from Japanese animation.

Ender’s Game
A young military recruit trains to become a leader before an insectoid alien race attack Earth again. Based on the Orson Scott Card book/s. I am reading the prequel trilogy to the main series now, so I thought I would pay this movie a visit. It was fine; from what I remember of the book, it seemed to parallel closely to the plot, but something about it (the plot) didn’t translate as well from the page to the screen. Maybe it was the fact that Ender’s external struggles was just basically military school—no actual enemy fighting, until after the final test, which was really an actual battle against the Formics. I don’t know. Writers talk a lot about “raising the stakes” but I don’t think readers care as much about stakes as commonly thought. When I read something, whether or not the protagonist’s life or the the fate of the universe is at hand. Loss of life is enough stakes for most everyone; maybe even just a hand. Hand-stakes. Constantly raising stakes is a bit too pandering to the reality TV dynamic. “Will the airheaded bimbo or the date-raping jock screw up their emergency shelter faster? Before, the loser would get voted off the island, but this time they’ll will be thrown into the island’s volcano. The stakes have never been higher!” Please, no. There’s maximum level of stakes before it get ridiculous. Anyways, this was a good movie, but Card being a Mormon and stating very Mormon-like opinions in real life might’ve played a part in the movie’s unpopularity.

Spawn
An elite assassin is killed and makes a deal with Malebolgia, one of hell’s rulers, to be resurrected with special powers and eventually lead an infernal army on earth. Really janky special effects, but this was 1997, so anything on this level was sure to be mesmerizing. It was weird to see the protagonist completely uglified for nearly the entire film, as he didn’t spend much of his time in the much more aesthetic Spawn costume. That might’ve been why this didn’t do so well in theatres—not maybe even comic book fans don’t want to see a homeless burn victim for 90 minutes straight.