Sci-fi and Fantasy Movies and Series Reviews, Part 37

The Secret of Kells
In an isolated monastery in medieval Ireland, and orphan helps prepare for a barbarian Viking invasion, alongside a legendary script illuminator and a mysterious forest fairy. An animated film for children that isn’t from Hollywood, Disney, Netflix, or Studio Ghibli…though it was distributed by GKIDS Films. At first I thought it takes some writing skill to make script illumination interesting to kids, but I pulled back on that a bit. If you think back to the pre-modern eras, back to when art as a skill was big and even a legendary thing to experience, way before literacy was common or even before Gutenberg, books themselves were rare in themselves, illuminated ones probably even more rare. You didn’t come across them unless you were in the know, as in the religious class of professions, or at least someone wealthy enough to commission an illustration. To put it in modern terms, illuminated books were probably like taking a spaceflight: rare and very expensive, only available to elite as trained and selected professionals (astronauts) or very wealthy. Common folks, analogous to the peasantry from back then, can only see what it’s like through film or photographs, though I don’t know what the analog of that would be in medieval times. Being audience to a book being read out loud if it rolls through town? However that worked out. I’m (very poorly, I think) explaining this. I want to think illuminated books, especially ones from a master artist, were magical in themselves, and the idea has to be translated for modern audiences by making it actually magical in some way. It feels like really untapped story potential, so in that sense it’s easy to write about and avoid retreading narrative ground, but at the same time it’s difficult because modern audiences have seen everything; it’s hard to impress by visuals now. You have to write sympathetic characters who regard the magic Macguffin as new and novel (haha) so that the audience feels it along with them. That probably isn’t easy to do. Anyways, it’s another feat to make religious figures interesting to kids, too, so that’s another mission that was well-met in this movie. The pagan Viking hordes acted like actual pagan Viking hordes who hated Christianity, and there was no silly attempt to have the protagonists “understand” or try to dissuade them from attacking, like you’d expect from every western movie made in the last few decades. What’s old is new again.

Ancient Apocalypse
A journalist explores the world’s oldest monuments and structures, and makes conclusions outside those proposed by mainstream academia. I hate documentaries because they can be the ultimate in propaganda. There are parts of our brain that can’t filter out what we perceive in real life against what we see on video, and since we didn’t start out watching television, we can’t avoid understanding the world around us both through the actions we see on television, which can be manipulated, in addition to what we see in the real world, which cannot be manipulated as easily. It’s no wonder modern life is such a disaster for our mental state, as we are constantly given wildly-contradicting information. The strongest signal wins. Usually. I don’t peruse Netflix for things, so I found this series a different way. My son and I were giving each other random trivia questions one night, and I asked him what the oldest known building in the world was. I actually didn’t know the answer until I fake Googled it (it was Göbekli Tepe), and that lead me to this series somehow. Even though I now knew about it, I didn’t have any interest in watching it until I read that academics didn’t like the host, and that it was vaguely racist to weakly imply post-Noahic flood cultures were taught agriculture or irrigation by outsider strangers traveling to their lands. Even though those outsider-saviors myths are everywhere from prehistoric cultures, and there’s no indication that they were white. It’s probably childish to assume others not liking something for moral reasons is actually a good reason to check it out, but that’s my personal problem. There’s two big takeaways from this series. The first is that there’s strong evidence that all of these ancient sites and structures have much older components to them, indicating the fact that post-flood wanderers found these structures intact and attempted to “build” around them in the same manner, reasoning that if they did the built similar things and in the same way their ancients successfully did, they might thrive as well. The second takeaway is that, yes, there was probably a worldwide flood of some kind 6000 or so years ago, but there also were disasters of the same magnitude or more, before then. Graham Hancock, the show’s host and researcher, doesn’t posit a regularly-timed, cyclical solar- and galaxy-caused disaster scenario, but I maintain that there’s more and more evidence for it. The bad news is that it’s not caused by mankind and we can’t do anything about it. The good news is that it’s not caused by mankind and we can’t do anything about it.

Bungou Stray Dogs
A homeless orphan is taken in by a supernatural detective agency. I really liked the humor in this, and the stylization (Studio Bones doing what they do) was right in that sweet spot between cartoonish and “too realistic and distracting.” I almost wanted to continue the series after the ol’ three-episode try-on, but I was still on the border of “yeah” or “nah.” The first dubbed episode is here. The first five minutes is a textbook example of how to set up multiple conflicts and mysteries. Protagonist is newly homeless and hungry (don’t know exactly why), and considering petty theft, but understandable has an ethical hangup about it; a man floats down the river upside down, protag saves him, man is irritated that his suicide was thwarted (don’t know why, yet); suicide-man is affable and offers to buy protag food, but suicide-man’s straight-laced coworker appears and yells at them across the river about his stupidity and wastrel ways (not so much a mystery but very obvious conflict); protag seems to know suicide-man, based off of his name, as someone famous (no details why, yet). Good writing all around.

A Quiet Place Part II
After sound-sensitive monsters ravage Earth’s population, a deaf teenager and a family friend travel to discover the source of a repeating radio broadcast. This was okay—mostly standard horror fare, not as impactful as the original. I can’t separate good acting from bad acting well, but there didn’t seem to be a bad performance anywhere I could see. There were two decisions that I thought were astronomically out of character, but after thinking about them, I whittled it down to just one. The first one occurred near the end, when the header of the island colony got in the car and started it up to attract the creature from the town center and draw it away from everyone. Emmett (the family friend) leaves with him, but also beckons Regan (the teenager) to come along with them. Why in the world would you put in immediate danger the person you’re trying to protect and bring back like that? He should’ve hid her in the house, like the (apparently much smarter) colony leader did with those couple of kids. But I realize this was an immediate crisis situation and people do stupid things in the midst of those. I suppose, on the other hand, that it could’ve been riskier for Emmett and Regan to be separated and Emmett not know where she is. The other character decision is the one I kept as inexcusably wrong, and it has two parts to it. When Regan’s mom, Evelyn, finds out she escaped Emmett’s hideout to go search for the radio broadcast source, she insults and guilt-trips Emmett into going to look for her. A woman guilt-tripping a man isn’t unusual, but she would be much more likely out-of-her-mind frantic and likely to just go look for Regan herself. Evelyn wasn’t injured at all, and Marcus and Emmett could’ve looked after the baby. But I can allow her (as long as she’s hysterical about it) to try to convince Emmett to go look, but only for a short while. After he initially refuses, which he did do, she’d just insult him again and run off to find her. This brings me to the second unbelievable part, where Emmett agrees to go look for her. No dude would take kindly to someone barging in on his safe house—bringing near one of the creatures, I might add—with four more huge liabilities (people, one of them a baby), and openly despising him for not putting his life in danger. He would’ve gave them a warning to leave, which he did, but when they started acting up, he would’ve kicked them out. It’s not like there’s any other men around to shame him into sacrificing himself. It would’ve been a dick move to do that, really, but Emmett would have a way of redeeming himself by eventually accepting them back, caretaking Marcus and the baby, and defending them against the creature that ends up breaking into their hideout. If the writers were inclined, he could die saving them so he fills the ultimate dead white male savior role. This could work doubly to nicely offset the only two prominent black dudes getting killed in different scenes, while trying to fight the creatures. If Evelyn escaped like I had pointed out, met up with Regan, and played Emmett’s role in that thread of events, it wouldn’t be out of character. You could even work in the “you’re more like your dad than you know, and that’s a good thing” line that Emmett said. Coming from mom that would have more emotional impact, not to mention more opportunities to demonstrate a pair of Lovely Angels. I wouldn’t do that, but we know modern script writers love the trope.

Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water
A young French inventor comes across an orphaned acrobat being chased for her mysteriously powerful blue amulet. One of the co-creators, Hideaki Anno, also did Neon Genesis Evangelion a few years later, but his mental issue hadn’t surfaced until then, so the characters in Nadia act like more or less like real people. Another co-creator, more contributing the concept rather than the details, was Hiyao Miyazaki, so you know to expect some good storytelling. For a television series, it was a solid turn-of-the-century technology adventure, replete with all sorts of prototypal flying and floating machines, underwater transport, and revived antiqui-tech. You really feel the enthusiasm for tinkering with new and interesting mechanics through the eyes of Jean, the engineer boy. There were a series of episodes notorious for slowing this series down, where Jean, the titular Nadia, and a few other characters were stranded on a desert island. It could’ve easily been cut down to one or two episodes, being sure to keep the few parts that really developed the characters: Jean gorging on weird mushrooms while looking for plant-based food for Nadia, their first smooch, Nadia getting cranky, their second smooch after Nadia chills out a bit, etc. Also, keep the unconscious dream sequence where Jean strikes oil, industrializes the island, and presents all of his ridiculous resulting inventions (sorry, the subtitles didn’t cross over when I trimmed the video, but the feeling is still there). If there’s one thing I might consider changing is Nemo’s attitude towards Nadia. She is (SPOILER) his estranged daughter, unbeknownst to her, and Nemo making her an apprentice on the Nautilus is courting disaster. And it does become a near disaster, at least, when Nemo decides to travel to Reef 64 to look for a cure for Nadia’s deadly fever, instead of engaging the enemy, which was his primary mission. Electra, Nemo’s 2nd in command, was right to be upset about the diversion. And any captain would toss anyone in the brig, whether crew member, apprentice or guest, who entered the bridge and started yelling at him in front of his crew. There should’ve been some other, more realistic way for Nemo and Nadia to interact without a captain putting the mission second to Nadia’s whims.

Summer Ghost
After they summon a ghost with fireworks, three strangers become friends as they solve the mystery of her death. The setup is stock: three troubled teens investigate a supernatural urban legend and learn to deal with life’s issues in tandem with the ghostly part. Good storytelling, which is what this movie exemplifies quite well, doesn’t always need an unusual premise. Summer Ghost moved fast in some parts, and I don’t mean it felt rushed because of the 40-minute run time. The flow of some succession of scenes had the feel of a montage to them, a lot like what Makoto Shinaki did in 7 Centimeters Per Second or the excellent The Place Promised in Our Early Days. There’s another movie, I don’t think by Shinkai, that was a lot like that but I don’t remember the title. I had tried watching it once but it jumped forward through time too much for me to follow. The concept is having more appeal to me so I might try to revisit it again, if I can trawl through my past reviews and find the title again. Edit: That movie was In This Corner of the World. I think I’ll rewatch it soon.

In This Corner of the World
A newlywed has to navigate her in-laws, food rationing, and Allied air raids in WWII Japan. I rewatched this after more than a year, and my irritation that it jumped around too much in the beginning still holds. Though, in reading other reviews, that was a pain point for different reasons, since a lot of the childhood and pre-betrothal scenes felt too slow and the events depicted weren’t so much impacting the main plot. I think maybe people just want to get to the bombing part, because both the time and place are in or near Hiroshima. There wasn’t a lot of buildup to the impending event, where things felt bordering on a comedy of errors a few times. The depiction of the conventional bombings in Kure, where Suzu (protagonist) lives was unique, though I’m not connoisseur of war movies. The viewpoint was all ground-level, or ground-level and looking up. There wasn’t a lot of the dramatic plane wooshing, or bombs-being-dropped screeching, or stock bomb explosion sounds, which I guess is a credit to the sound direction in this film. Precious few watching would actually know what it’s like to be a civilian on the ground during a conventional bombing raid, so directors could exaggerate things out their eyes if they wanted to. Maybe it just felt more real to me because the bombing sounded different than from any other movie I’ve seen.

Inception
Thieves who steal corporate secrets via dream invasion are tasked with implanting an idea in the mind of an elite CEO. The thinking man’s Dreamscape, mixed with maybe one of director Christopher Nolan’s earlier works, Memento, which I didn’t like. I like the concept of dream levels, where time moves progressively slower as you go “down” deeper into the dream, but the main conflict of Inceptions’ story bothered me. I read about this issue, unrelated to this movie but rather in the context of western storytelling in general, where the modern protagonist always has to be driven by a personal stake in the main conflict. It’s where we got the, “This Time, It’s Personal” cliché, but that was probably back in the 1980s when the trope wasn’t so ubiquitous. It probably took over from stories that emphasized duty—dare we posit masculine duty?—as in, completing the mission because that’s what the character felt he needed to do, or it’s what expected of him, or that’s what his ethics demand of him. Let’s look at Star Wars characters: Princess Leia was driven by her duties as an ambassador and politician, and Obi-Wan came out of retirement because Leia needs him and he’s really Luke’s sworn guardian. Luke’s desire to fight in the rebellion was the usual teenage restlessness, and while Leia’s message actually ignited a sense of duty within him, but he didn’t develop it until the Leia rescue on the Death Star. He didn’t complete the journey until he fought in the Battle of Yavin. Han was an anti-hero because he’s just in it for the money (“I’m in it for ME!”), but obviously redeemed himself in the end. Any personal stakes, like Luke and Obi-Wan’s death, were secondary. With Cobb in Inception, he may have had an extreme dislike of CEOs in his backstory that drove him to this type of espionage in the first place, but the film’s main conflict is him dealing with his wife’s suicide and her avatar or whatever it was in dreamworld. It was okay, I guess, finding all of those secrets out, but it felt a bit like I was creeping in on a self-therapy session for most of the runtime.

Morbius
A sickly doctor’s cure for his blood disorder turns him, and a friend and colleague, into vampires. The movie that launched a thousand memes because of how disliked it was, and gave studio and marketing heads an opportunity to demonstrate their cluelessness about memetic culture. The movie itself was fine, to me, if not forgettable. Stock characters: the brooding anti-hero, his counterpart with the same power but different goals, the mentor who (spoiler) is killed nearing the end of the second act, the love interest. Eh—Nothing really bad but nothing new. It’s too easy with superhero movies, especially ones with anti-heroic protagonists, to fumble along with motivations and decision-making, and I think that’s what happened here.

Noragami
A shrineless god tries to win some fame and fortune with the help of an unassuming high school girl and a wandering spirit called into his service. Similar to Bleach in its premise, in that there’s battles against animalistic spirits plaguing living people in the area, and mixed relationships with the different kami (gods) of Japan. Similar approach to humor, as well, so the narrative was a good mix of lots of different things. I really liked the depiction of the gods to their Regalia, dead humans that they take under their care and turn into weapons on command. The dynamic of the relationship reminds me of the Hebraic strain of Ancient Near East feudalism, of which I am a big fan, because there is great value placed on the spirits (humans) themselves over anything else. Regalia were given special names when they came under the god’s domain, and the god and Regalia were “physically” linked in the sense that the Regalia’s mental state directly affect their master’s well-being. Property and monetary wealth were secondary concerns. Yato had some power as long as he had a Regalia; he didn’t need money or a shrine, though that could help him accomplish a particular mission. Part of Yato character arc was learning not to be such a jerk to his Regalia, Yukine/Sekki, because he was shown at his lowest when their relationship was strained. It’s such an interesting dynamic that I wish the series went past two seasons, or that other writers would explore it. I had a earlier post that linked to a removed video that helped illustrate all this, but here’s the scene showing Yato claiming wandering Yukine’s spirit as a Regalia.