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| AKA: "The Last Love Song on This Little Planet" |
Dear Internet,
Everyone
dies. There, Internet. I saved you four and a half hours of depressing
teenage angst filled with plot holes. I
do not like to spoil stories, as I have said before. But when the story is already a spoiled mess
that is not worth the time to view, the argument against doing so goes out the
door, gets shot, blown up and dies a somehow slow death being burned
alive. That could basically sum up my
feelings over "Saikano," but that would be taking the easy way out,
much like how the characters seem to do countless times through the course of
the film.
About
the only thing good that "Saikano" has going for itself is the
premise. Chise and Shuji are two
teenagers in high school who are dating.
A war of unknown details breaks out.
Chise is taken by the Japanese government and has a weapon system implanted
into her body. She then fights the enemy
forces that wage war on Japanese land.
Shuji find out and deals with the fact that his girlfriend is has been
modified into a bio-weapon soldier. The
two must figure out their relationship with the backdrop of war behind them.
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| The show pours the creative budget into make a different set of wings for each scene requiring them. |
That is
where the good stuff ends. The only
thing that I should add to the premise is that Chise spends a considerable
amount of time questioning her humanity and sanity. Shuji does likewise, but Chise really goes in
circles. Speaking of circles, the first
half of the show goes around in circles for much too long. One episode they are together, next they want
to break up, and then they miss each other and want to be together but do not
want to go back on saying that they only want to be classmates. The indecision between the two is annoying at
first and just gets worse as the show continues. Take for example Shuji's actions towards Ms. Fuyumi,
his teacher from middles school who he had sex with. She makes advances towards him because her
husband is gone for long stretches because of the war, and she feels lonely. Shuji keeps going back to her, engaging in
some action, and then pulls back at the last moment before doing something that
would go against his feelings for Chise.
This happens at least three times in the show and each time it kept
feeling like a bad plot point that was going nowhere rather than the test of
Shuji's love for Chise that it was supposed to be.
You can
look at Fuyumi as one of a dozen characters who are thrown in as nothing more
than trying to show the horrors of war.
There is the fellow classmate that is killed in the first episode before
he can give his girlfriend a necklace.
While one would think that this would act as a catalyst to make the two
main characters come closer because they would realize the fragility of life
and wish to live without regrets, it does not.
In fact, Shuji and his friends decide to completely ignore their friend's
death rather than acknowledge it and heal.
There is the female soldier that dies off screen while on patrol, whose
gender was only put there to make the viewer more sympathetic. What about the man who helped Shuji fix the
motorcycle just in time to be blown apart by a bomb? How about the friend who decided to go fight
in the war to protect his sweetheart who does not even like him, which is
somewhat even more invalidated because of the fact that the war is never even
explained fully until the last scene of the show?
The war
is perhaps one of the biggest problems with the show. The war is shown to the audience in the same
way that it is presented to the characters in it. Which is to say that next to nothing is ever
explained. International, and even
domestic, communication is shut down at the beginning which means that the full
scope of the conflict is never quite shown unless what Chise says can be
trusted. More on that in a bit. Planes just show up whenever they want and
bomb towns. There are no air raid sirens
or any sort of warning system to tell the residents that the enemy is
coming. Bombs and planes make no noise until
the bomb explodes, then they make lots of racket. The enemy that Chise and the army is fighting
is never explained who they are or why they are bombing civilian cities. Only at the very end does the show do a horrible
job of explaining. Apparently, the big
wigs knew the world was ending and are fighting for resources. How does the world end? Earthquakes.
What is causing the earthquakes? Why are the earthquakes occurring? No reason.
It is a poor attempt at filling a plot hole that the show created to add
the feel of helplessness but only makes a bigger hole in the end. It is worse because the info is being delved to
the audience and characters by an even bigger plot hole, Chise's bio-weapon
modifications.
Chise's
modifications are the center point of the show.
Without them, she and Shuji would have had a pretty average life
compared to her peers who are being blasted apart. I can deal with the fact that she is
implanted with some sort of space-age technology. That is the free ticket for the show. However, the show makes no attempt to say WHY
she is selected to get the weapon implanted.
She is obviously taken by government spies, but the show never attempts
to say if she got the implant willingly or not.
On top of that, the show never explained why she willingly follows
orders in the beginning. Later on, Chise
is shown to be acting as a soldier so that she can feel numb to the pain of
leaving Shuji, but why she cooperates in the beginning is conveniently left
out. It is not as if she is being forced
by some override switch since she is constantly running off and avoiding her
military role and duty. The army cannot
even threaten her to do what they want because she is indestructible. The one thing that the army should have done,
and would have made more sense, would be to threaten Shuji's safety,
blackmailing Chise to do what they want.
What does occur is even more mindboggling. No one from the military ever discourages
Shuji from interacting with Chise. In
fact, whenever Shuji is anywhere near a soldier while with Chise, he is
completely ignored like he is not there.
The single person who interacts with Shuji from the government does so
in a jelly-spine, half-hearted manner that it is amazing that he got the position
at all. I just expect my MIB type characters
to have more confidence.
Then
there is the fact that the origin or design of the bio-weapon is never
explained. Even how the weapon works is
never quite brought up. Is it of an
alien design, as can be seen in the later half?
Is it made by modern science, since she seems to hide missiles under her
shirt? There is no answer for any of
this. The audience must also conform to
the fact that Chise is the only source of information about the world. How does she know this? Bio-weapon.
Throughout the show she is constantly getting various powers and
abilities and the audience is constantly being told to "just go with
it." The accuracy of her knowledge
is never questioned by anyone in the show.
The show just wants to use the excuse of her having a plot device sewn
into her to be able to fall back on time and time again. The problem with this is that unless you
explain the plot device to a point, the credibility of it can be called into
question. Even the fact that the show
wants to showcase Chise questioning her humanity as the bio-weapon takes over
her body falls flat.
The
various things that I have talked about are mostly plot based. However, the show is supposed to be character
driven. The problem with this is that nearly
every single character is completely messed up in the head and has not learned how
to grow up. With the exception of
Shuji's parents and the guy who fixed the bike, every character has emotional
problems that paint the world as being filled with broken people. Take the middle school coach who had sex with
her student. How about the character
that decided to have sex with a boyfriend she did not love out of pity for that
fact, not to mention that he knew she did not love him? How about the army lieutenant that goes on
dates with Chise but ends up crying the name of his wife as he bleeds to
death? When confronted with problems,
these characters take a defeatist attitude, which makes even less sense when
the soldiers choose such. It only brings
up what kind of training they are giving the recruits if they fall apart so
easily. Even the main two characters are
so filled with backwards logic that it becomes grating. One moment they want to live, the next they
want to die. Each episode feels like a
trip down a schizophrenic road with the way that they bounce back and
forth. You might argue that the worst
culprits are supposed to be acting so because they are teenagers filled with
angst and depression caused by love and war.
The problem with this is that this kind of horrible drama only appeals
to teenagers filled with angst and depression.
I did not like that drama when I was a teenager, and it is even more
annoying when being portrayed in stories.
Teenagers in stories never have the right answer to life's problems and
it takes them forever to reach the right ones.
This is exactly what happens in "Saikano" throughout the show
except it applies to nearly everyone.
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| At least he was chastised for asking such a dumb question. |
"Saikano"
is a screw being turned slowly in my head.
The premise felt exciting and refreshing when I started. As the show continued, it became bogged down
by depressing pessimistic philosophy. It
never shines a gleam of hope, and when it does, the hope is bombed out of
nowhere. The show is not happy in the
least. It is a giant pity party for
people who cannot deal with the difficulties of life and would rather wallow in
sorrow than better their conditions. The
worst part is that the ending wants to present a picture of some bitter sweet
ending, except it fails. Like I said,
everyone is dead, except for Shuji who must wait out his life as the only human
alive while walking around in a dream state.
He is trapped in an inverse form of Kurama's Sinning Tree from "Yu YuHakusho,"
living in a dream world until his death.
"Saikano" would like to think that it can capture the pain of
love and war but it feels like a pile of cynicism which spills over into the attempt
at romance.
Yours in digital,
BeepBoop
P.S. Tomorrow is "The Mysterians" (1957).
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