Sci-fi and Fantasy Movies and Series Reviews, Part 52

Kite

After her parents’ grisly murder, a teenage girl becomes an apprentice assassin.

Given that I could get past the hyperviolence, I wanted to watch this after seeing its legendary falling-from-a-skyscraper scene. Most of the action was an understated version of the absurdity of that scene. Since Sawa is a Nikita-type of protagonist, there’s a few “Destroy the Horny Jerk” scenes, which, surprisingly, is not a trope listed despite being incredibly overused in modern stories. I really need to do a post on that.

I watched a little bit of the sequel, Kite Liberator, and it didn’t appeal to me.

The Five Star Stories

Ladios, the pilot for a Mortar Hedd mecha, joins with his new genetically engineered co-pilot, Lachese, to face off against a corrupt emperor and his competitors.

The title neither refers to the number of stories in the film nor their quality, but to the number of solar systems involved. When you stuff so much into a 66 minute runtime, you’re gonna give everyone the sense that they’re missing out on a much larger story. That sense is very correct, because this film depicts the first arc in a decent-size manga series, which is actually set to continue this year. I get the feeling this movie was a way to get more people into the actual print material, but who knows. Five Star requires a few viewings since they throw a lot at you, with the mecha and piloting system, the way the feudalist structure works, and the various competing factions.

And didn’t you know? There’s a “Destroy the Horny Jerk” scene. While we’re on that topic, I realized Wonder Woman (2017) didn’t have one of those scene despite having the backstory to support it. It came dangerously close, though. The sequel, Wonder Woman 1984, made up for it. Both scenes are pretty bad in different ways.

The Green Knight

A knight-in-training decapitates the half-tree, half-human Green Knight, and must make good on his vow to visit the Knight in a year to receive the same blow.

I read the book in high school, and I think some time later again, but I honestly forget most of it so I can’t comment effectively on how this iteration compares. Let’s just say liberties were taken. The setting of the book was 5th or 6th century in the British Isles and at that time there’s not a blessed chance you would find a Chinese woman or a sub-Saharan African, or an entire Indian family anywhere near the noble family, much less in their court. I will say Dev Patel, playing Gawain, is rather Anglo-looking for an Indian, but we all know why there are non-Anglo cast members there. To the filmmakers’ credit, the high fantasy, non-real-world elements of this take make the diversity casting a little less unbelievable.

Patel is a fine actor, but Gawain is a lousy modern protagonist. Aside from the beheading scene at the end of the first act and the very end of the conclusion, Gawain doesn’t act but is instead pulled along the plot by secondary characters. He also fails all the tests except at the very end, but in my opinion he didn’t completely fail the lust test. since Lady Bertilak really just sexually assaults him in bed. Punching her lights out or running away like Joseph from Potiphar’s wife would be way too convenient for Lord Bertilak—he’s not going to side with Gawain over his own wife.

It may be the only time I’ve seen a letter seal realistically portrayed. Those wax seals were usually hardy since that was the information security of the time. One didn’t just casually unfold a sealed letter as though it were secured by Scotch tape. Breaking the seal had to be very deliberate. In this scene is a great example of anachronistic female empowerment nonsense: the king would have had her beheaded for taking a letter given to him directly, and reading it, all in front of his subjects.

I recognized Sean Harris as the king because of his weird gravel-whisper voice, yet I didn’t recognize Kate Dickie as the queen until I looked her up. I don’t know them anywhere else except from their roles in Prometheus, another fine Christmas movie.

Eyes Wide Shut

A high-society doctor in a rocky marriage stumbles onto a cult ceremony.

I had no interest in this movie until Rob Ager had a series (first video here) about Stanley Kubrick’s maybe-coincidental death shortly after the film’s final cut was finished. Interesting to note I had searched for this on my Roku, and the empty state search results message was, paraphrased: “This title is not available anywhere”. Not a message I had seen before at all when doing searches. Other streaming services didn’t have it either. Why was a film by a famous, established director with two A-list actors in their prime not anywhere to be found? Eventually, a few months later I searched again and it showed up as available.

I was expecting to not finish it, despite wanting to look for the whatever clues Kubrick left behind about a conspiracy among real-world elites. Thankfully, the more explicit parts of the degenerate ceremony were censored by CGI people blocking the view, which was reportedly Kubrick’s idea. Kubrick, too, is pretty good at leaving breadcrumbs so you are pulled from scene to scene, so all the extended shots and never-ending dialogue don’t seem so tiresome. Those extended shots were made a little more uncomfortable at times when you know there were, according to some, supposed to be voiceovers that were either edited out or not recorded in the first place.

Protagonist Bill had an unbelievable amount of women throwing themselves at him out of nowhere, but he doesn’t end up having sex with any of them, either by his choice or the circumstances. The idea that Bill’s life apart from Alice is actually a dream sequence explains might explain the unusual level of women’s interest in him. There’s no way of knowing, though, where you’re looking at the dream part or the real world of Bill’s (and Alice’s) existence. Maybe that’s part of the point?

There’s not much you can really conclude in terms of details, if any, about what Kubrick was trying to say or who specifically he was targeting. The people who might have the key to that cipher aren’t talking. All the nasty revelations about Epstein/Diddy/Beiber/Weinstein, etc., seem to give Kubricks’ vague propositions some credence, especially the interpretations about the ending and what happens to the Harford’s daughter in the toy store, but that’s as far as it goes.

Robot Carnival

A series of animated shorts, all featuring robots.

The first story is actual the title sequence. Watch as a massive, crawling vehicle shoots off fireworks and explosives, deploys spinning dancer androids, blasts circus music, and runs roughshod over a poor desert village, just to advertise the movie itself with its ROBOT CARNIVAL-shaped hull. Gravity avenges the village at the bookending story.

My favorite was probably “Cloud”. It’s meant as a description of man’s evolution but it’s simply a Pinocchio/growth story: the robot attaining humanity at the conclusion is the real narrative symbolized by the story occurring in the clouds. You can watch it here, starting at the 23:50 mark. Youtube has it but the video fidelity isn’t great. The short is literally sketchy and lower video quality actually makes it a lot harder than usual to see what’s going on.

Abigail

In a city quarantined from a deadly virus, a girl discovers a secret society of magical rebels.

I’m always up for a steampunk technology movie, but if Tubi or whatever free streaming service didn’t have this, I wouldn’t have watched. I want to think this started as an anime script, but it’s Russian. Russia, to my knowledge, doesn’t have any native anime studios, and ain’t no way a Russian moviemaker is going to get a Japanese studio to make this. There’s something about the narrative beats and absurdity of character decisions that would only work in an animated film to pass the suspension of disbelief test.

To make matters worse, the actors ostensibly spoke English, but all the dialogue was overdubbed after the fact and the dubbing only matches the mouth movements halfway all throughout. Again, this works fine in animation, specifically anything that isn’t realistic CGI because there’s some leeway with mouth movements if the characters are stylized or hand-drawn. Even when you have, in live action, dubbed dialogue, the mouth movements completely don’t match the words at all, for better or worse. To have them kinda sorta match is excruciating to witness.

Despite the underwhelming critical response, Steamboy is a really good steampunk movie—one that isn’t from Studio Ghibli.

Lazarus

An team of ex-cons is assembled to find him a scientist in exile, after he reveals that those who took his miracle drug, Hapna, will soon die.

This series had a lot of high hopes since it’s a Shinichirō Watanabe creation and it somewhat resembled Cowboy Bebop in a lot of ways, visually, down to its grungy, jazzy, duotone lettrist opening, and his fetish for gay-or-something-like-gay (this time it was a full-on tranny) side characters and non-Japanese. When you create a near-perfect animated story, legendary in all the right ways, nothing you do is gonna top it and probably won’t reach an equal level.

Usually I don’t notice these things, but (spoiler) I knew Dr. Skinner was living in the homeless camp, owing to my powers of observation and seeing him when he was being questioned by Axel and Doug. Yelling at the TV is not my thing but I did it when this scene happened. I don’t know how a winter hat and glasses would be able to disguise the a man that everyone in the world is looking for, but this is anime logic at work, I guess. One wonders if it would be better if Dr. Skinner was the one who got the cut-and-paste treatment for his unmentionable parts, and not the homeless camp’s leader.

Dr. Skinner was an okay villain but he gave a speech at the UN (boring) about the dangers of climate change (snore) and how humanity is a scourge upon the planet (dies of cringe). I get that you need a Current Thing the audience can identify with if you have an antagonist angling to off everyone on the globe, but, my friends, this is science fiction. You can devise any kind Macguffin technology you want to amplify a humanity-wide vice, so going with the Standards Concern of the Day is not a good sign that you’re putting in the required effort. I look to the Laughing Man arc from Ghost in the Shell on an excellent way to blend science fiction tech with a real-world issue, without getting nerdy or preachy.

The way Axel escaped in the first episode annoyed me. He was known to have broken out of prison before, yet there was only one guard—a very incompetent guard—watching him while he was out in the open in the cafeteria talking with Hersch. Axel took full advantage of the sole incompetent guard watching him and bailed, though I think it was partially an excuse for Watanabe to have a parkour scene in the first episode. If I were a competent writer on the task, I would have Hersch being some hacking device that released Axel’s restraints secretively, after which he could do his normal escape. That way you can have the parkour action without resorting to the grossly dumb law enforcement hole…at least, you won’t have to lean so heavily on it.

In the last few episodes, Axel and Soryu fight and are pretty badly injured: Axel with a spear through his abdomen and Soryu with a deep meat cleaver cut in his leg. Axel ends up in a hospital for the night, but the next morning is up and at ’em, fighting Soryu again on some rooftop, doing all of his parkour magic as if nothing happened, not even half a day later? I hate to bring reality crashing down on your, sir, but if you took a spear straight through your obliques you’re not doing anything but laying in bed for a few months. Anytime you so much as sniff you’re going to be in a lot of pain, so there’s absolutely no way you’re doing any hand-to-hand combat unless you have Street Fighter 6 hooked up in your hospital room.