However, I did get to watch two memorable movies this spring. Let's get the better one out first--Summer Wars.
Summer Wars is set in the future where a single underlying social media platform is tied to all the infrastructure of the world. Now, while this may seem like a science fiction flick, don't watch it for the science fiction. Because that is really not the point, and while they have apt and eye catching visualizations of mechanism, and the animation is really cool and smooth, it has been simplified down to a point where it is really pointless to dwell on it. For example, what does martial arts training has to do with playing a fighter video game? Don't even get me started on using decimal integers to store the encryption key for the social media platform or how the admins didn't start a nationwide lockdown after the data got corrupted and blah blah blah...
Because all of this is besides the point. The movie focuses on the old Shinohara family. After getting invited on a part time job by his crush, Natsuki, Kenji, our protagonist gets swept along the flow of interactions of her family, something that he did not get to experience himself due to his background.
It makes you think about it for a while. With such a pervasive social media platform, would you still be able to bond with your family tightly? Even now, we have the problem of teenagers focusing more on the external relationships through social media instead of focusing on the people around them. Kenji is the mirror for most of us. He's always with his phone, in contrast with Natsuki, who is always with her family.
Family is an important value and idea in the East. We are taught to cherish family and to stand by them and back them whenever we can. In most anime you see nowadays, family is often a neglected element because they will take away a lot of the focus, for the reason that family are the ones who shape a lot of your character. Anime that shows familial interactions tend to have better development of their character, for example, Clannad, Zero No Tsukaima, Oreimo, and even Oregairu (even though this is shown more in the second season, with Hikigaya's sister). One anime that shows zero development with the main character even with family, would be Mahouka Koukou No Rettousei. There I said it! This is mainly because the main character has the setting of a rigid machine. Seriously, go read the novels and tell me that isn't the case. His whole world revolves around his sister and that's just about it. Everything he does, he does for his sister. There is no second dimension to his actions, and I probably just read it for the magic described in the world, but I will not spend any money for it.
But I digress. On to the next movie, which is a patriotic(?) live action flick. Note that this time though, it would be full of spoilers, as this is a very long full blown rant.
Set in the mountains of modern china, about a group of mercenaries fighting off a troop of elite soldiers while trying to escape to safety and completing their mission, to kill off an elite sniper.
Okay, okay that isn't really the real synopsis. Let's look at the real one from imdb, shall we? A Chinese special force soldier with extraordinary marksmanship is confronted by a group of deadly foreign mercenaries who are hired to assassinate him by a vicious drug lord.
Now that is supposed to be a patriotic film, but note that it plays out more like satire with all the plot holes...wait, there is a plot?
The film starts off with elite forces busting into a drug dealer's factory, shooting everyone on sight (#1). Then suddenly a random guy comes out through some other door and proclaims that he has nothing to do with this. All the cops suddenly stops shooting.
He then gets taken as a hostage by the drug dealer from behind. The cops back down because there is a hostage situation and that it's not like they would kill anyone without first confirming that they are innocent, right? Right??? (see #1)
What. The. Heck.
Our guy, a sniper, then moves ahead and because the drug dealer guy is hiding behind extremely thick walls, he had to shoot through the walls to snipe the guy. It's not like he shot the wall three times and the drug dealer don't even know that the wall beside him is being shot at anyway. I mean, walls aren't meant to vibrate, right? It's not like the cops can bust in from the main door, which they have secured or anything, right?
Seriously.
Well, for his heroic actions of shooting the drug dealer dead, he got removed from the army and is instead placed into an elite unit of troops, wolf warriors, designed to challenge the army itself so they would improve themselves.
I have to say though, the female commmander managed to portray herself as such a bad ass while she was recruiting our guy that I actually thought that she would be something to watch later on. Well.....
Next, we get to see them welcome him by pointing their tanks at each other in a circle, I mean, pointing their tanks at him. Then the second commanding officer tells him about the reason behind calling themselves wolf warriors.
That's because wolves are pack hunters. Now look back at the synopsis again. Remember, pack hunters.
In between, somewhere, we get to see another drug dealer, Min, get caught in his mansion, and as he taken away by the police, his mercenaries come to rescue him is a well thought out, concerted effort. It was cool to watch mayhem occur around Min, as the mercs duke it out with the police, with not a single bullet scratch on him. I applaud the director for showing just how much of a badass this team is. First the sniper shoots, then the cavalry shows up in a motorboat, and uses the speed advantage to take out surrounding reinforcements, before allowing the infantry to chase the remaining police into the mansion, which they then blow up with a bazooka.
Team players, the lot of them.
Min wants to them to take out the Chinese sniper that got his brother, and so they do.
The wolf warriors then get into a battle stimulation. Our guy is in the blue team, where they got their entire communications hacked, and in response, the red team commander sits in front of a console and types a few lines and hack them back. Is this supposed to show how easy it is to hack into the military command center through software?
During the second half of the stimulation, the mercs show up and attempts to take out our guy while in the middle of the entire damn PLA. They nearly succeeded, but instead killed another member of the wolf warriors, who didn't even put up a fight, or acted calmly, or do anything as an elite trooper of the PLA.
After this, it's just a fireworks show of how the mercs are so much better than the entire damn army, or the elite troops of the PLA, for that matter, and in their own homeland, nothing less. They have members who take care of comms, evac, sniping, infantry, and vehicles, when the other side have......soldiers? I think.
I cringed when the merc sniper decimated the team before they hid in a trench. Really, for a troop of elites, not a single flash grenade to take care of the sniper, whom they have already spotted the location? The merc infantry provided cover fire as the sniper took care of the commanding officer. They deliberately wounded the officer so that the soldiers would get up to the CO, and get shot by the sniper. Tactics, tactics, tactics, all on the merc side.
I cringed when they called for a sniper to take care of the enemy sniper, who got shot down already by the merc sniper. So what do they do? Maybe have our hero, who has shown "extraordinary sniping skills" in the first half of the movie take up the sniper gun and snipe him back? That would be boring, wouldn't it? So what he did was run up to the sniper instead. Mind you, running, without a care for mines, or the cover fire, which has been gracefully removed to show the heroic scenes of our hero. Teamwork, anyone? Anyone?
I cringed when they walked through the river without even bothering to scan for mines. What the heck? Didn't they study the Vietnam Wars? The lethal thing about mines is the steel balls they shoot out at high speed when it explodes. And then our guys runs through the mine field on his own, with mines exploding left and right, and no steel balls shooting right through him. Right...Again, showing how much of a hero our guy is without him team bogging him down.
Not to mention that our heroine is reduced to a useless girl who just says encouraging words, without any tactical help.
At this point, you might have gotten the idea that this movie is actually more on criticizing the PLA than praising it, and is satire to the amount of money spent on training elite troops has no more of a result than getting more than half their team destroyed by a group of 10+ mercs who are former elite troops from the West. Which is seriously depressing when you know that the Nanjing army actually endorsed the film, so I guess the publicity team of the movie actually managed to sugarcoat the film like it was Pearl Harbour, I guess.
So all in all, if you want a better Chinese war movie, don't watch this one. There are better ones that show much heroism of the whole army, instead of just one lone wolf, with an actual plot.
No comments:
Post a Comment