tinulthin Reviews

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)

Dostoevsky's Heroes

[8/10 · 27 March 2016]

There seems to be a sense of gleeful abandon in the hate piled on Batman v Superman, with fierce denunciations of incoherent storytelling, excessive morbidity, unclear character motivation, and - worst of all - a lack of faithfulness to the source material.

Now, I'll put this up front: I loved both Watchmen and Batman Returns, two films that get a lot of hate for being slow and dark.

Did Man of Steel earn dark? No. While I understand Snyder's conceit that it was a formative Superman story, it's implausible that someone who demonstrated such conscience in the middle act would have to murder someone to learn murder is never the answer, or realize that punching someone into a building might endanger innocent life.

For Batman v Superman, dark is earned. While Superman is still finding his feet, Batman has been at it for 20 years. He's tired. He's jaded. He's lost a Robin and Wayne Manor. This isn't the Batman of the mainstream comic - this is the Batman of The Dark Knight Returns. There are machine guns on the Batmobile. He's been killing for years. And those crying foul over liberties with Batman's principles would do well to read Frank Miller's dystopian masterpiece: here we have a Batman broken by the cost of two decades of battle with nothing to show for it but ongoing crime.

Then this guy shows up who could stop any crime in an instant, but doesn't. Yet he has so much power he can kill thousands by accident. How could a hero devoted to protecting the innocent possibly allow such a danger to exist?

That's the surface part of Batman's motivation. But as we see throughout the film, Superman's very existence can damage the human psyche. Some worship him. Some see him as a hero. But for Bruce Wayne, who's been frustrated by his own inability to end crime, he represents an invalidation of everything he is. With a veritable god around, is there even a point in being Batman? What were all his sacrifices for? Bruce Wayne turns to drink to quiet his constant existential demons, and his increasing brutality is just another inappropriate outlet. This is not a hero Batman anymore; this is one who must be reined in.

This film also addresses the question of whether Superman's power is too much for one person to hold. While the MCU has many super- powered beings, as of the start of this film, DC has only one. Superman could kill us all, and we simply need to have faith that he won't. Batman himself turned from a paragon of justice to someone who kills to get the job done. How could he be sure Superman wouldn't do the same? And if he did, who could stop him? As (seemingly) the only other hero around, he has a responsibility to ensure Superman is either contained or destroyed. And nowadays, "destroy" is his natural choice.

This is why the story hinges on Batman's faith in Superman's humanity. While it could be argued that the transition is too quick when it comes, we must also remember that Batman is, though he doesn't know it, seeking to reclaim his own humanity. The realization that he's about to slay a man - not a god, but a man - who fears for his mother just as he feared for his own drives a nail straight into his heart. It may be contrived (what superhero movie isn't?), but it's not without logic or motivation.

As for Luthor, he has a similar existential problem. He doesn't fear Superman thwarting some particular plan. The problem is, if Superman exists, what are his plans worth?

Luthor believes knowledge is power, and as one of the most knowledgeable people on earth, he's at the top. Then Superman arrives and tilts the scales forever against him: no matter Luthor's knowledge, Superman will always have more power.

You can see Luthor cracking during his library speech, as the thing that makes him feel useless stands there while he can do nothing. Nothing, except pour his mind into finding a way to destroy Superman, both eliminating the symbol of his inadequacy and proving that knowledge can defeat a god's power.

And what kind of plan does he hatch? One that manipulates two heroes into mutual destruction while he prepares an insurance plan. It's a complex scheme from a complex villain using only his intellect to destroy the most powerful thing on earth. It's hard to follow, and should be, as it creates a worthy opponent for the detective Batman.

We must also understand that while we have a fallen Batman, we also have an incomplete Superman, traumatized by the idea that, despite his power, he's unable to save his mother. That Batman refuses to help - and won't even listen - drives this not-yet-self-accepting Superman to act in rage. The first appearance of Kryptonite is another shock. While the reaction is foolish, it's set up by the story: only Superman's humanity holds him back from killing Batman, yet the very symbol of his humanity is at stake, and the contradiction makes him prey to emotion.

This is not a film about physical goals, where villains want to steal something or destroy something or gain control over something. This is Dostoevskian: The characters' actions have everything to do with their sense of who they are. For Batman and Luthor, Superman's existence invalidates everything they ever thought themselves to be. And for Wonder Woman - who is, yes, important here - his dogged sacrifice represents a reason to fight for humanity once more. Her presence gives significance to his actions, and finally brings us around to what Superman can be at his best: the guy who does the right thing even when it's the hardest thing to do.

Rurouni Kenshin: The Legend Ends (2014)

Back to Dagobah

[7/10 · 15 September 2014]

Rurouni Kenshin: The Legend Ends (aka Rurouni Kenshin: Densetsu no Saigo-hen) corrects two mistakes committed in the first half of this two-part conclusion to the Kenshin story: Exposition has been dropped to zilch, and instead of a series of tension-free one-vs-all rumbles, every fight is a one-on-one nail-biter.

That said, between all the engaging fights, the film falls into the Dragonball abyss of story stagnation. Makoto Shishio (Tatsuya Fujiwara) has assembled an army—and a massive ironclad battleship bursting with cannons—to overthrow the Meiji government. The only thing standing in his way is a bunch of screenwriters who've realized, "Oops, he's won—better make him arbitrarily change his mind or the movie's over."

Enter the Pause Zone, where the formerly brutal assassin decides to hold off his attack until the titular Kenshin (Takeru Sato) is caught and executed by the authorities in Tokyo. Never mind that Kenshin was last sighted off the coast of Kyoto and might well be dead—it's time for everyone to sit around and wait. And wait. And wait.

Kaoru Kamiya's (Emi Takei) entire contribution to the film is to be asleep and then wake up. Sanosuke Sagara (Munetaka Aoki) is relegated to watching Kaoru be asleep and then wake up. His only contribution comes in the last act, at which point he essentially rehashes his big semifinal fight from the first Kenshin movie in 2012. It's fun, but it's not much of a payoff when you've seen it before.

Kenshin spends much of the film on the Japanese version of Dagobah with his master, Hiko Seijuro (an effective Masaharu Fukuyama), in an effort to up his game after being defeated by Shishio and Sojiro Seta (Ryunosuke Kamiki) in the last film. The extended, artfully choreographed stick-vs-sword pummeling opens up some well-earned character development—as well as a few wounds—and could have formed a strong core to the story if the filmmakers had been able to restrict themselves to a single central character.

Sadly, none of the other characters gets to develop so much as a hangnail. Shishio's myrmidons, the Ten Swords (Juppon Gatana), are each given a single line of motivational justification narrated by a fist-fighting monk, and few get to express anything beyond fashion sense. Sojiro suffers most: the breadth and implication of Kenshin's anti-killing philosophy have been so thinly established—and Sojiro's background so hazily sketched—that their final conflict, while a thrillingly tight sword-and-grapple affair, has no emotional stake, and Sojiro's subsequent breakdown lacks context or justification.

And woe be to those who question the purpose of any of the action: Aside from Kenshin's meeting with his master, the entire trip from Tokyo to Kyoto is revealed to have been entirely unnecessary, as the finale takes place back in Tokyo anyway, and the entire cast could have just waited at home.

Aoshi Shinomori (Yusuke Iseya) could have been written out of the script entirely. His fight with Kenshin is poignant, but only serves as a speed bump on the way to a conclusion that has been sitting static since the opening act.

Most unforgivably for a film that has tried to be gritty and political, the setup for the finale is simply preposterous. In the previous film, Shishio had such superior intelligence capabilities that he was not only able to assassinate a government official in transit, but also make it look like the work of another group. In this film, he is somehow completely oblivious to the weeks-long construction of half a dozen cannons on an exposed hilltop within sight of his ship—which inexplicably sits stationary in open sight the entire time.

Blackmailed into action, the Meiji government announces a public execution for the captured Kenshin (the capture is delightful, but the sudden appearance of fifty cops is about as believable as Charlie Chaplin). The execution is to be held not in a secure location, but on the beach alongside Shishio's ship. Considering that it's revealed that the government is (spoilers!) planning to betray Shishio—a plan that will surely result in the shelling of the beach—why invite the public to an impending war zone? And if the government's entire purpose in executing Kenshin is to save face, why then allow the public to see that it's clearly Shishio's men, and not the government, who are in control?

We're not finished yet: When all hell breaks loose, a longboat full of cops immediately rows right up to the broadside of the battle cruiser—over open water, in broad daylight—without dodging so much as a shot. Much hay is made of the government's pusillanimity in firing on the battleship while the protagonists are still aboard, but the deck doesn't so much as wobble for ten minutes at a time when the heroes have a score to settle. Does the artillery crew just go to lunch? And why doesn't the ship just sail out of range? For that matter, why does Shishio's sword make fire? And where does Sadojima Hoji (Ryosuke Miura) go after taking that punch to the face? Is anyone keeping track? Suspension of disbelief is one thing; you can't just toss the established rules of a movie world out the window and expect the audience to blithely go along for the ride.

And then, at the height of all this logic-free lunacy, something incredible happens, and even Aoshi's otherwise pointless existence is excused. The final ten minutes of The Legend Ends represent the most innovative and inclusive four-on-one fight to ever to grace the silver screen. An expanding cast of psychos, heroes and hellraisers piles on not one after another in clichéd action fashion, but in fully choreographed five-directional fury, with every fighter bringing his own style and character to the game. The sequence is simultaneously brutal, gripping and hilarious—exhilarating and mind-blowing. It's almost enough to make us forget all the sins committed on the way.

Almost. Just don't ponder how Kenshin got the other half of his scar.

Rurouni Kenshin Part II: Kyoto Inferno (2014)

Long Tease with Flashes of Delivery

[7/10 · 9 August 2014]

The first live-action installment of Rurouni Kenshin judiciously cut several arcs from the original manga and anime story to deliver a tight, cohesive narrative that built up to a satisfying conclusion — even if it did reveal a few late-story secrets far, far too early. The first half of a two-part follow-up, Rurouni Kenshin: Kyoto Inferno (a.k.a. Kyoto Taika-hen) suffers by failing to take the same discretion with the source material, choosing instead to mirror the manga's episodic, drawn- out build-up to the decisive confrontation between Himura Kenshin (Takeru Sato, a former Kamen Rider) and Makoto Shishio (Tatsuya Fujiwara of Battle Royal and Deathnote fame).

This film could easily have worked as a televised miniseries, with a sense of minor resolution every twenty minutes or so as a greater, unifying threat loomed in the background. But as a singular arc, Rurouni Kenshin: Kyoto Inferno lacks any cohesive build or pay-off as Kenshin wanders from one seemingly arbitrary encounter to the next. A plea for help. An assassinated official. A stolen sword. A village in peril. A search for a swordsmith. A plot to burn Kyoto. A desperate rescue. An open-ended conclusion. And between each burst of choreographed violence, a ream of static exposition that would nearly send George Lucas looking for an editor.

The story partly suffers from its need to play clean-up to some first- film decisions. Hajime Saito (Yosuke Eguchi) has already been introduced as an unambiguous ally, and although he's allowed to display more badassery this time around, the film lacks the taut-wire tension between Kenshin and the ex-Shinsen Gumi leader that formed the backbone of the manga's sensational Kyoto arc (Saito's opening face-to-face with Shishio is also a bit silly, largely resembling an outtake from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom).

The film also struggles to introduce Aoshi Shinomori (Yusuke Iseya, who was interesting in Casshern back in 2004). While wisely excluded from the first film — another semi-villain would have just been too much — cramming all of his development into an expository sub-story this time around fails to do justice to one of the series' most compelling characters. By the time he faces off with Kashiwazaki Nenji (Min Tanaka), the ostensible leader of the Oniwa Banshu ninja group (translated here as The Watchers), we really haven't had time to get to know him or care about his goals.

One standout, however, is Tao Tsuchiya, who's delightful to watch as Oniwa Banshu ninja Makimachi Misao. While her attempts at anime-style spunk don't quite work, her full-throttle wire-assisted combat displaces enough bamboo to evoke positive memories of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Ryunosuke Kamiki (voice of Bo in Spirited Away and Marukuru in Howl's Moving Castle) similarly sets up an effectively creepy Sojiro Seta, though in a film crammed with so many new characters, we don't quite get to know who he is so much as simply what he does.

As for the remainder of the supporting cast from the first film, they are almost entirely cut from the runtime, appearing only during Kenshin's should-I-go-to-Kyoto quandary at the opening and then again at the end. This leaves Kenshin meandering the middle arc as an arbitrary avenger, with only an incidental connection to the travesties Shishio creates around him — and repeated scenes of women and children weeping extravagantly over dead bodies feels more desperate than driving. With Sato's portrayal of Kenshin predominantly set to glower, we don't get a clear sense of the radical shift between his carefree and killer states, and it's unclear which moments truly resonate with the reformed assassin.

The action sequences are exceptionally well-choreographed, and generally fun to watch. But with so many featuring hero-vs-the-world stuntman slaughter, tension is quickly lost. While there are fits of incidental action, there are only two big one-on-one fights for the title character, and the second, though Bourne-like in its innovative use of tight spaces, involves an antagonist we barely know and who only serves to mechanically set up the next plot point (He's also done up a little too ridiculously for a live-action villain — another area where deviation from the source material would have been wise).

Taken on the whole, the film feels like watching only the first quarter of Kill Bill Volume 1 stretched to 139 minutes. Much sound and fury, signifying little — and even a citywide battle in the penultimate arc seems arbitrary and unearned. Having gone through so many unrelated minor objectives, the stakes are unclear and the emotional investment isn't there. Perhaps this will all be put paid in the second half, promised in September. But until then, this Rurouni Kenshin feels long on tease and short on delivery.

(Disclosure: I got to play the first plummeting body in the video for One OK Rock's Mighty Long Fall, the film's closing theme.)

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)

A Hero without Principles

[1/10 · 10 May 2014]

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 has technical merits. However, these merits are impossible to enjoy in a film drowned from beginning to end in the sickening narcissism of both its purported hero and supposedly tragic villains.

I give you The Amazing Spider-Man: a hero with no principles and no goals. He sometimes cares about a girl and sometimes wants to know what happened to his parents, but day-to-day he really only cares about doing what he wants to do--which happens to be helping people, it seems, because it gives them "hope." And what luck! He gives them this just by being himself. Not by being a better person. Not by sacrificing anything else in his life for the greater good. Just by being strong and smart and doing exactly what he feels like doing because that's how he feels. And look: by being himself, other people want to be like him. What a wonderful message for a self-obsessed age. And watching the box office dollars roll in, it would seem that this is just what everyone wants to hear.

Ah, but lovable doe-eyed Petey gives up Gwen for the greater good, right? No he doesn't. He gives her up because he can't face the guilt of having contributed to her father's death--his guilt, and his unquestioned inability to give up being a famous public figure, lead to his need to break up (And his principled stand on this issue is so strong that he will renege on it whenever he feels randy). We never see Peter torn between helping people and helping himself. We see him torn between two paths to self-gratification: the adulation of public heroism (and public vilification, which is a kind of adulation) and the love of a single woman. What about Aunt May? No, not her--she's just in the way of Spidey laundry.

This is the major problem with the reboot: The overshadowing death isn't Uncle Ben's. It's Captain Stacy's. And Captain Stacy didn't die because Peter was self-absorbed. Captain Stacy died because Peter existed. So the standard for Peter being a good person or bad person has nothing to do with his character--it has only to do with his presence. During an over-the-top car chase in the first act, rather than stop a massive truck from smashing through a set of cars (which Sam Raimi has shown us he could have done, assuming equivalence between a truck and a train), Spidey ducks out of the way only to come back after the carnage. This is a hero who says, "I'm here for you--until it's inconvenient for me, then you're on your own."

The long and short of it is that this Spider-Man is in no way heroic. Superheroes are heroic because, while they could decide that they are unconcerned with our struggles, they still feel a moral obligation to help the average Joe. This Spider-Man seems to feel obliged to help only because, as someone superior to everyone else, the world's problems must naturally fall on his shoulders. Not because someone died due to his inaction--because he's exceptional. And helping inferior people is what exceptional people do. Sometimes. When they're not busy dealing with exceptional-person stuff. Like obsessing about parents who unjustly abandoned them while feeling no responsibility whatsoever for the uncle they themselves abandoned.

Add to this a pair of villains who go from being apparently well-meaning if somewhat imbalanced individuals to homicidal maniacs due to a single rejection episode, and you have a two-hour cesspool of poorly justified destructive self-obsession.

Electro could have been a tragic Frankenstein villain. Instead, because a group of random people roots for Spider-Man over him in his first public appearance, he decides everyone should die. Yup--that's his motivation. You don't love me because I'm me? Well, I'll kill you all. Thank you, Columbine.

Harry's the same. After a five-minute meeting in which Spider-Man refuses give him his blood--which he truly believes, based on a single night's research on a single computer file, is the only thing that can save him from a horrible death that won't happen for another 40 years--Harry decides that Spider-Man needs to die right now. And everyone who dies in the process of saving his own old-age skin is perfectly okay. This despite Harry having been Peter's best friend only 48 hours before--though not because they have a long history together, but because they talked for a few hours and remembered how they were friends eight years ago. And it's not like either of them developed any other close relationships over their entire time in high school and college. (Let that be the only mention I will make of this film's preposterous set of causes and effects--and its Attack-of-the-Clones-inspired need to intellectually dictate emotional importance rather than meaningfully display it.)

The original Spider-Man had a single moment of narcissism. Count 'em: one. Only once did Peter Parker step up for glory, himself, and his own objectives, and he immediately paid for it with the death of one of the only three people he loved. This new Peter Parker steps up for himself every day as a part of his playground vision of a hero, and not a single screenwriter or billion-dollar audience member seems to care. This Spider-Man says the world should glorify you for being you, and if that doesn't happen, it's the world that needs to change, not you. And that is what truly terrifies me.

Les Misérables (2012)

Les Misérables

[9/10 · 22 December 2012]

The guiding ethic of any film adaptation of a legendary source must be: "Change as little as possible." Those in charge of Les Miz knew precisely what they were working with. A few songs are shortened, a handful of lines altered, and a few scenarios condensed or adapted to their original literary form, but the whole remains gloriously and satisfyingly intact.

The Work Song is set to the image of a hundred convicts battling a stormy sea to pull a listing ship into dry dock—and only here does the film's live-recording ethic fall short, as the music and voices lack the power to match the imagery, seemingly washed out by the sea noise, where the live musical would normally captivate from the first note.

Neither of them theatrical belters, Jackman and Crowe's performances feel subdued in the opening scene. But the film finds its gravitas the instant Colm Wilkinson appears as the Bishop of Digne, and from that instant, the next two and a half hours are nothing less than the repeated sliding of the viewer's soul up and down a finely-honed blade.

The ability to take close-ups gives the film an intimacy that is unattainable on a Broadway stage, and power numbers are sometimes reduced to a chilling whisper. Anne Hathaway destroys herself to bring Fantine to life, and her incredible, personal pain washes in waves from the screen. The tooth removal, normally excised from the musical, is even back from the book—though modified in location. Confrontation is then viscerally set as a full-on close-quarters sword fight.

Film also allows a depth of scale that challenges the stage. The transition to At the End of the Day is a grim and powerful scramble through the slums of Paris, shaking the screen with the palpable rage of a nation. Look Down is another tour de force, while Do You Hear the People Sing emerges from a quiet, elegiac call to arms that organically overtakes General Lamarque's funeral procession.

Samantha Barks' Éponine lights up in her every interaction with Marius, and shots of her in the background of A Heart Full of Love are soul-rending. But she suffers just enough tiny cuts that A Little Fall of Rain is not quite as arresting as it should be, and the constant close-ups amputate the power of a scene that should captivate not only through its intimacy, but through the inactivity that washes across the entirety of a once-violent stage.

Russel Crowe's soft-voiced Javert takes some getting used to, and while it works more often than one might expect, he sometimes seems to be singing with a sock in his mouth—most notably during One Day More, where he seems to have been mixed in at a different volume level from the rest of the cast. Yet the cinematography of Stars is simple yet stunning, and Javert's Suicide suffers nothing in this interpretation.

M. Thénardier endures a few cuts (most notably the truncation of Dog Eats Dog), but Sacha Baron Cohen steals enough asides and chews enough scenery that his part hardly feels reduced.

The background has been filled in with elements from the novel, and those who have read Hugo's epic will appreciate nods to Fauchelevent and the Petit-Picpus convent, Gavroche's elephant-home, Marius' grandfather, and the tavern behind the barricade. There is even a quick cut to Gavroche when Éponine is shot, winking at their normally undisclosed sibling relationship.

Even the finale remains perfectly and satisfyingly intact. The only challenge with a film that so precisely parallels its stage inspiration is resisting the necessity to deliver a standing ovation once the final note has been sung. If only they had found a way to incorporate a curtain call.

Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo (2012)

The Bland of Evangelion

[7/10 · 22 November 2012]

The first two "rebuilds" of Evangelion crammed twenty episodes of the 1995 Shin Seiki Evangelion TV series into a span of three and a half hours, upping the musical and animation ante every explosive step of the way. Three years later, Evangelion 3.0 showed such promise: A teaser trailer so confident that it revealed only the internal workings of a piano; previews of an eyepatched Asuka spiraling through space with a shield and massive rifle to soul-rousing operatic strains. Yet after all the fervent build-up, Eva 3.0 feels like one of those reboots where a project was taken over by people who never understood why the franchise had rabid fans in the first place. Creator Hideaki Anno is still at the helm—and even back in the director's chair—yet when the film is over, the subtitle "You Can (Not) Redo" feels, more than anything, like an apology.

Anno opens with Asuka and Mari deploying multi-stage booster rockets, high-powered sniper rifles, massive shields and a brand-new pink Eva to fight off an Angel while retrieving Shinji and Unit 01 from Earth orbit. The sequence is brilliant, operatic, even tear-inducing: Then Shinji wakes up in yet another intensive care unit and the roller-coaster ride crashes straight into a ditch from which it will never emerge.

In 1997's the End of Evangelion, Shinji was offered a world in which he could merge with all of humanity so that he would never again have to feel alone. In Eva 3.0, he is offered a different world—one in which no demands are made of him at all. Enter ninety minutes of nothing.

This is not like what Anno did when he ran out of budget for the animated series, when he drove fans berserk by throwing out all the robot rumbles to dive into the characters' psyches for the last two episodes. Eva 1995 was all about the characters, putting broken human beings in a world-on-the-brink environment with the idea that their most intense struggles would still be to be loved, cherished, and accepted for who they were. Eva 3.0 strips away both the characters and the environmental crucible, even eliminating the deeper question of why everything is happening, and leaves us only with the hum-drum intellectual exercise of finding out what happened.

Shinji awakes into what is essentially the set of Das Boot melded with the bridge of the Macross. Misato is captain of a giant whale-like flying ark called the Wunder, the Nerv command crew man her bridge, and the cast is rounded out by a trio of space opera stock characters who get more lines than all the old cast combined. Even Mari, who had 'dark impending purpose' written all over her introduction in Eva 2.0, turns out to be nothing more than Asuka's sharp-shooting, one-liner-dropping sidekick. And despite the Third Impact having begun just to save her, when we finally meet Rei, she has no memory of the event and no connection to Shinji—or anyone else—whatsoever.

It turns out that the Third Impact was aborted part-way, and Shinji has been fitted with a Battle Royale-style choker designed to pop off his head if he shows any sign of becoming a deity again. While for a time it seems that we have been immersed in an alternate-universe Eva redesigned as a space opera, it is actually fourteen years later, and all the character dynamics that brought fans to the series have withered and died away. Rei, Asuka and Misato speak so little it's as if they aren't even there, and even Shinji doesn't wallow in self-pity; he is confused by all the changes, but with all the characters so different, the emotional boil we would normally expect to see at this stage of the series simply cannot emerge.

Having achieved friendship and affection in Eva 2.0, Shinji is much better adjusted than in his television iteration, and when he is whisked away from the Wunder to meet Kaworu, he's not desperate for approval—he just wants to know what's going on. Separated from all the people who cared about him, Shinji wanders through the hollowed-out remains of Nerv headquarters playing piano with Kaworu, stacking books for Rei and playing shogi with Fuyutsuki. And if that sounds about as exciting as a lazy Sunday afternoon, then you can imagine just how agonizing the middle hour of the movie becomes. By the time Kaworu outlines what Shinji could do to fix the world, there's just no reason to care. While there's an attempt to create drama over whether Kaworu's late-emerging MacGuffin will actually bring a 'fix' or the Fourth Impact doesn't really matter—from the audience's perspective, either change would be welcome. Even Ode to Joy can do nothing to elevate an Eva-on-Eva battle when there's no longer anything significant at stake.

Aside from the opening, the most exciting part of Rebuild of Evangelion 3.0: You Can (Not) Redo may be the pre-film. In what is perhaps a dark parody of Pixar, the movie begins with a short film by Studio Ghibli showing the arrival of Nausicaa's God Warriors in Tokyo. Although inexplicably completed using people tromping around a miniature city in creepy God Warrior suits, the piece, narrated by the voice of Ayanami Rei (Megumi Hayashibara), is unusually grim and captivating.

Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance (2009)

Double the intensity with half the Asuka

[9/10 · 30 June 2009]

(PARTIAL SPOILERS) The first Rebuild of Evangelion, You Are (Not) Alone (a.k.a. Evangelion Shin-gekijoban: Jo), was essentially an upgraded distillation of the first six episodes of the original Shin Seiki Evangelion television series. Little was lost or added, and key scenes were recreated shot-for-shot, all the way down to the most famous "fan service" peek-a-boo angles.

The second installation of the four-part Rebuild series, You Can (Not) Advance, sets itself an almost impossible task: To condense seven hours of the TV anime, episodes 7 to 20, into a single 108-minute feature.

Continuing the tradition from the first Rebuild film, upgrades are everywhere. Both the bomb-Angel Sahaquiel and the satellite defenses deployed against it are unfurled with aplomb, and there's a fresh exhilaration to the Eva units desperately sprinting to the Angel's projected point of landfall. The preamble to the battle against the infected Unit 3 has been shortened, favoring instead an extended sequence of bloody desecration accompanied by a chillingly ironic selection of background music. The film concludes with a disturbingly metamorphic version of the unstoppable Angel Zeruel, and when Rei attempts to blow it up at close range, this time her N-2 bomb isn't just a cute little canister.

Beyond these three points, however, the film is more an impressionistic retelling of the series than a literal one. In place of those strained scenes where Anno had characters stand stock-still for long, awkward moments, we have elaborate images of people moving about and living in Tokyo 3, and there's a pleasant sub-plot written in to unite all the main characters. Shinji is allowed to be slightly stronger, even revealing a useful domestic skill, and we lose much of his protracted soul-searching, though we still get a taste of it toward the end of the film.

While the TV series was sometimes criticized for its tendency to stop and navel-gaze, with the reduced run-time there is inevitably a rushed feeling to You Can (Not) Advance, and nobody suffers for it more than Asuka.

Asuka arrives frenetically and with minimal introduction, seeming to have been given license to chew the scenery in exchange for the little time she's allowed on it. Her "Sohryu" inexplicably replaced by "Shikinami," Asuka retains variants of a few of her most memorable scenes, but her early arguments with Shinji feel forced, and we lose delightful sequences like the synchronized battle against the splitting Angel Israfel. Asuka shows more depth more quickly than she did in the series, but it feels as though she has to fight for every moment of screen time.

Rather than bringing anything unique to the franchise, new character Makinami Mari Illustrious seems to be little more than a bloodthirsty stand-in for Asuka. Where Asuka has been toned down, Mari has gone over-the-top, and her scenes could just as easily have been written for the redheaded half-German girl.

Sadly, while the TV series had remarkably good incidental English (if horrible incidental German), You Can (Not) Advance opens with a lengthy sequence dubbed by English speakers who were clearly phoning it in. Kaji gives it his best shot, but he's given lines that are well beyond the capabilities of seiyu Yamadera Koichi.

Like its predecessor, You Can (Not) Advance aims for nothing less than shock-and-awe. The lack of breathing time, coupled with some wrenching twists to the original story, enhance the intensity tenfold. Be sure to stick around until the end of the credits, where you will find not only an ad for the next film, but a very important concluding scene as well.

Ponyo (2008)

All the Enthusiasm of Finger Paints

[8/10 · 27 July 2008]

Gake no Ue no Ponyo is like something you might get if you mashed My Neighbour Totoro into The Little Mermaid, then put the entire project in the hands of a five-year-old animation prodigy. The film is simultaneously stunning in its beauty and endearing in its simplicity, unrestrained enthusiasm walking the edge between inspired brilliance and mind-addling delirium.

In the opening sequences, literally thousands of individually animated fish swirl across the screen—a task Western animators wouldn't touch without a room full of computers. And yet the film's omnipresent water is defined by hard lines that seem to have been drawn in with crayons and coloured by pastels. In style and content, this is clearly a children's fantasy, and yet it isn't.

Remarkably, Miyazaki has yet again achieved what he created in Totoro: a film that draws the viewer indelibly into the world of children, reminding us of the time when every discovery was unique, every possession precious, and the agony of loss crouched behind every well-meaning mistake. Perhaps this is why the film has appealed more to adults than to children in Japan: children still live in this world. They need no such reminders.

Sousuke, a five-year-old who retrieves the eponymous Ponyo from the ocean, is not another Pinocchio-like screen caricature. He is a real boy. He is intelligent yet careless, deeply conscientious but distracted by impulse. He grounds us in a world that wavers between the real and the surreal.

Wide-eyed wizard Fujimoto, voiced with narcoleptic mania by comedian Tokoro Joji, is by far the most rational of the film's fantastical creations. He's an oddball, but he makes sense. But when waves begin to lap at the doorstep to Sousuke's hilltop home and the townsfolk jovially pile into rowboats to scud over a swollen sea of prehistoric fish, we begin to wonder whether this is the real world or some beatific daydream. Miyazaki draws no clear distinction.

Gake no Ue no Ponyo is a children's love story, driven with monomaniacal ferocity by Ponyo and Sousuke's pure mutual affection. Composer Joe Hisaishi underscores this intensity, calling up mighty swells of strings to accompany Ponyo's first ascent to the surface, and later evoking Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries in a stunning sequence where Ponyo chases down a speeding car while running atop a cascading tsunami of gigantic fish.

While the film loses much of its energy—though none of its eccentricity—in the final act, Miyazaki has nonetheless succeeded in creating yet another modern fairy tale. It is a simple, pure vision, guilelessly washed across with a devoted kindergartener's finger paints.