Sci-fi and Fantasy Movies and Series Reviews, Part 36

Ghost in the Shell SAC_2045, Season 2
The threat of the posthuman virus and its part in the Sustainable War scenario increases. I had a hard time following the story here, because the animation is way too distracting for me. However, I may have figured out the big reason why Production I.G. went the realistic, motion-capture CG route, instead of the cel animation, or even anime-style CG, that the studio always done for this franchise. It’s to realistically portray the posthuman ability to accurately predict opponents’ moves in a fight and dodge them. That it’s extremely difficult to land a bullet on them even once is a big plot point, and doing that goofy bullet-dodge dance that the posthumans do is impossible to portray with traditional cel animation, without an enormous budget. That’s just a theory, anyways. It seems like a silly reason but you have to imagine how ridiculous the dodging would look using traditional animation on their current budget. The story seemed fine; I’d have to watch the season a few more times to get it all, but I don’t have the motivation right now. I kinda wish the John Smith character didn’t come back. An American NSA agent, patterned after Agent Smith from The Matrix? You already know he’s going to be an antagonist. And why would they borrow a character from a movie that was extremely heavily inspired by the original Ghost in the Shell movie? Who green lit that idea?

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990)
Four mutated turtles—named by their also-mutated rat master, Splinter, after Italian Renaissance painters—fight the Shredder and his thieving Foot Clan in the streets of New York City. I was lucky enough to see this in the theater when it came out. I wasn’t a huge fan of the cartoon but the idea of fully-animatronic humanoid turtles in a live-action film, not a puppetry version with a human arm shoved up their butts, was fascinating to me at the time. It kept the same tone as the cartoon, too; this was a few decades before children’s franchises had to be more adult and edgy to appeal to their maturing fanbase. The 2014 remake was bad, yes, but in one way it was more faithful to the graphic novel source material. The comic book turtles were a lot more violent and intense than the children’s cartoon version, and this matched the 2014 film version a little more. One non-trivial thing I like about the 1990 version, and most renditions of the turtles, was that their physique is usually more like a gymnast’s than a bodybuilder’s. The 2014 turtles looked huge and unstoppable—they didn’t scream “teenage” nor “ninja” to me. Their arc’s starting point in each episode, even in the cartoon series from what I remember, was their physically and mentally immaturity in the first act, but learning something by the conclusion. When they are agile and hulking strongmen with weapons, it’s hard to picture them struggling with conflict so much.

Stargate Origins: Catherine
Professor Langford and his daughter unlock the secrets of the Stargate in 1938. I thought this maybe would’ve been some kind of prequel to the original Stargate, and so approaching the same quality? Big mistake. It’s set in WWII, outside of the United States. Do you know what that means? NAZIS NAZIS NAZIS and more NAZIS. So you know who’s going to be on the bad side. If you’re highly cultured like me and remember the first and best Stargate movie, you know that Catherine Langford is alive well past the events of this Origins movie, so she’s got some impenetrable plot armor. Catherine in Origins is oboxious in the way modern women in movies are obnoxious: manipulative, an expert in one area while lacking common sense (she spits at a NAZI NAZI NAZI solider aiming a gun right at her), guilelessly determined. Determination counts for a lot in movie world, I guess. She’s also super strong: while wrist-bound in the back of a jeep, she was able to love tap the NAZI NAZI NAZI NAZI captor in the back of the head, right into unconsciousness. She also knows how to use guns. Not sure how an archaeologist’s daughter would come across that skill set, but, sure…why not? Since Catherine doesn’t mention anything about traveling through the stargate to Dr. Jackson in the original movie, the writers used one of the biggest deus ex machina explanations: a memory wipe right before the protagonists get tossed back to earth. One of the Egyptian Big Bads, near the climax, suddenly has mind control powers, too, which begs the question: why didn’t he just use it sooner, like on his rebellious daughter, and/or more often, as to raise an army or whatnot with the native Abydonians. Maybe it was explained why somewhere, but I didn’t care to search through the mess again. Whatever. In the immortal words of the Critical Drinker, “f*ck off, film!” Don’t watch this movie, please.

Ranking of Kings
A young deafmute prince learns to use his guilelessness and interpersonal influence as he contends with other rulers. Likely one of the only justified All-Loving Hero characters you could come across. I saw this in Crunchyroll and dismissed it as juvenile-looking, but I took a chance on it because of AnimeEveryday’s review, and I didn’t regret it. It gets saccharine at times; Bojii is constantly getting worked up about things, which I guess makes sense given his age and all the types of misfortunes and reversals of fortune he endures. If there’s any drawback to this series, it’s that it can take real emotional cheapshots—well-written cheapshots, however. The series also does a good job of revealing Bojii’s history gradually, working it into the story to avoid the stock and expected methods of exposition and info dumps. You’ll have a hard time figuring out who to side with and who to oppose; there’s lots of revelations about supporting characters’ motivations that would shift viewer sympathies, except for Bojii. He has great character development, but there isn’t an ounce of anything objectionable you could see in him.

Spirited Away
A forlorn girl ends up in a resort for supernatural beings, has to save her pig-transformed parents, and reclaim her human-world name. Hayao Miyazaki’s magnum opus, even though I think Howl’s Moving Castle has a little bit of a stronger story. He did write Spirited Away specifically for 10 year old girls, so maybe he held himself back with some things. There’s really not a whole lot to complain about here, and a whole lot done exactly right in terms of great storytelling. There were one or two very minor usages of CGI that looked janky, but that’s about it. There’s one thing to note about the subtitled version in the original Japanese, though I think the English-audio version used it too, was the word “love” to describe the relationship between Chihiro/Sen and Haku. Western ears likely misinterpret the word there, because using “love” in that context, between a girl and a boy, would nearly always imply something romantic, but there’s very little romanticism between the two. We’d find it a little odd that a 10 year old would be romantically involved with a slightly more mature boy who is really a thousands-years-old river spirit. There’s a whole complicated mess of opinions inside anime fandoms about the appropriateness of romanticizing/sexualizing an animated character, either between two characters in-universe or with real-life people finding a character attractive. The view of consent laws, especially between two very different cultures (American and Japanese), doesn’t clear things up at all. So, all of this to say, Western minds might default the “love” description in Spirited Away to romantic love, and get rather confused. If it’s romantic, there’s little evidence of it, and hey, it is a bit weird. If it’s a filial/friendship kind of relationship, using “love” instead of a phrase like “true friendship” to refer to that is also a bit weird. There’s no third option, somewhere between friendship and romantic, that is even considered, which is likely what Miyazaki intended. I don’t know anything about the Japanese view of love and relationships, so I can’t say, but I want to say the relationship is similar to the Bible’s description of the intense, lifelong friendship between Jonathan and King David. That kind of relationship, when not referring to maybe two adult women or a group of women, is completely alien to Americans without having it turn into a gay thing, or jokingly referred to as “bro love,” or having it turn romantic/sexual. I harp on this because it’s fundamental to understanding Chihiro’s character development from a bored, unmotivated pre-teen to someone willing to sacrifice her parents’ well-being for someone else she (kinda sorta) just met a day ago.

Lost Odyssey (video game)
Kaim, an immortal soldier with a bad memory is sent to investigate a giant magic machine, after a freak meteor destroys the both sides of a dueling army. The story had a lot of promise until a number of “just too stupid” things broke the reality it was trying to create. I was able to tolerate the annoying jokes from the Horny Alcoholic Comedy Relief (HACR) character, but he just didn’t stop when I thought he would settle down a bit. The biggest one was that the queen of an entire kingdom was left alone in a huge room, no guards, to play a harp, during a time of great international conflict, and get captured by the HARC. Granted, she was also immortal, but, I don’t know…aren’t state secrets a big thing? In a world filled with humans who more or less act like humans, she would’ve have been locked down in secret and decoys would be everywhere. The HARC wasn’t the least bit suspicious that it was so easy to walk up to her and start talking? Okay, then. The final straw for me was when a pre-teen girl, not even 100 lbs if she had a belly full of Ramen, was able to kick down a fully grown, trained male soldier in a suit of armor, and knock him back maybe ten feet. All of the cables holding up my suspension of disbelief just snapped off and I couldn’t continue watching after that.

Bubble
In a flooded Tokyo where the laws of gravity have been altered by extraterrestrial bubbles, a competitive parkour runner is befriended by a mysterious girl from the waters. This was a treat to look at, but it was likely an absolute nightmare to storyboard and animate. There’s lots of different long shots of the drawn figures running/jumping/spinning through a 3D/CGI environment, all from a rotating perspective. Lots of colorful, complicated backgrounds to depict the decay. I would’ve named this Battlekour (battling parkour) because that sounds a lot more appealing and descriptive to me than Bubble, but the movie isn’t quite about parkouring. It’s a very obvious retelling of The Little Mermaid. The fairy tale is mentioned and referenced in the actual movie itself. Anyways, I liked this decently, as there was no real villain to speak of, but more of a weird and unfortunate situation. There were criticisms I’ve read that the plot was terrible, though that could be a synonym for the viewer just not liking the movie itself. Bubble‘s plot wasn’t terrible in itself, but merely simplified and left some things unexplained. Unexplained plot points are a detraction if it contradicts something else without reconciling it, or if the information is necessary knowledge to complete the “logic” of the story. We didn’t really need to know why Uta starts to decompose when she touches Hibiki—she just does, and the whole point of her existence has nothing to do with making sure she doesn’t decompose.

Final Fantasy VII (2021, video game, part 1)
Cloud Strife, an enhanced soldier (sorry, ex-SOLDIER), joins a group of eco-terrorists to fight against his former employer, the Shinra Electric Power Company, that extracts precious mako energy from the earth. I played the original a long time ago in college, but I forgot much of it, so I can’t comment on how different the story is in comparison. I’m on the fence with the appeal of the story. On the one hand, it takes some skill to make a group of terrorists seem sympathetic. They pretty much make innocent people’s lives miserable, even if their cause has some moral value to it. On the other hand, the Shinra leadership is overplayed in its villainy: the two Big Bads had such crazed dark scowls that you didn’t have to imagine that they were, in fact, Very Bad Men. Probably one of the most one-dimensional Final Fantasy villains, aside from General Hein from the Spirits Within movie. The biggest storytelling weakness is in Cloud himself. He doesn’t have to be charismatic; indeed, some character arcs involve people learning to become that way, but I don’t see much of any growth. He starts off merely working for money, with a slight grudge against Shinra, though not nearly the level of the revenge instinct Barrett and Avalanche has. Cloud goes too much with the flow of everyone, to the point of letting the three women (Tifa, Aerith, Jessie) openly take advantage of him while he rebuffs their romantic advances. I get that maybe Cloud hangs back so much to let the player “fill in” the absence of his autonomy with the player’s, but that doesn’t seem to work as well as it does in games like the first 2 or 3 Halo games, where Master Chief doesn’t talk quite so much. There were some funny moments, like Barrett humming the traditional Final Fantasy victory fanfare, or three of the protagonists introducing themselves to Heidegger before he gets ambushed.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners
In a future obsessed with cyber enhancements and body modifications, a troubled teen ends up with a mercenary group doing a corporation’s dirty work. Here’s the thing with cyberpunk universes: when the protagonist is on the criminal or normal citizen side, the nihilist-p0rn goes way overboard. It’s probably a weird outlet for writers that want to see how they who can make the worst human being imaginable. Cyberpunk stories, on the other hand, from the Lawful side of the moral alignment—think Ghost in the Shell, Psycho-pass, Blade Runner, maybe even some of Altered Carbon or Aeon Flux—have a lot more nuance and thoughtfulness to their character arcs. If cyberpunk is supposed to demonstrate, at least in part, the questionable ethics of state actors and LEOs, it’s doing a really poor job of it. I’d side with the dutiful enforcement officer representing a rather soulless state apparatus over the scumbag gangster any day. Coming from a dude who dislikes any modern government, that’s saying a lot. Anyways, the story in Edgerunners was rather paint-by-numbers cyberpunk, with a few decent points. Part of that predictability was because I knew Studio Trigger’s approach: there’s always a huge twist (usually a death, but not always) in the narrative somewhere in the early-to-middle of the second act that changes the course for all the players involved. It’s genuinely something you don’t expect, but you know it’s gonna happen. EDIT: Trigger conforms more with eastern storytelling conventions, particularly the Kishōtenketsu structure. With Studio Trigger, you know the animation is going to be off the rails, too, which is probably the best part of this series for me. Gore is meh, but the trailer breaks some ground by showing nearly all the kills in the series, set in rhythm to a jacked-up remix of Beethoven’s 9th symphony.

Dead Space: Downfall
A mining spaceship ship carries a strange artifact that drove mad the colonists that found it. This was the prequel to the first game in the main franchise series, and the Ishimura, where this movie takes place, ends up being one of the places explored in that first game. The animation production values weren’t anything to email your goofy uncle about, and there’s the typical violence and gore you’d find with a “Lovecraft horror, but in space” premise. There’s lots of interesting ideas to explore with the planetcracker concept, where barren planets are mined for their resources on a very large scale. Of course, a cult forms around the Artifact of Doom, so you know who the human bad guys are, apart from the zombified ones. I rate “cultists” almost as low as Nazis when used as antagonists, because there’s not a snowflake’s chance in hell they will ever be treated sympathetically; you’ll already know how the story will end up. At the very best you’ll get one of them who doubts the cause just a little bit, and he’ll be spotlighted very early on and will be abused, so you’ll have just a bit of attachment to him. Near the end of the second act he’ll betray the Nazi or Nazi-like cause to help the protag get the upper hand, often at the cost of his life. The mourning will be brief. Anyways, there’s some minor dialogue early on in the movie about how humans aren’t meant to be in space since it doesn’t really do well for us psychologically. Obvious foreshadowing of the Marker’s effects on people, but a nice concept that can been explored in different stories.