Entry 123: "The Monster X Strikes Back/Attack of the G8 Summit" (2008)

The Monster X Strikes Back/Attack of the G8 Summit

Dear Internet,

                Now, I on the right footing by watching the correct film today.  "The Monster X Strikes Back/Attack of the G8 Summit" is something of a sequel to the original movie.  I say somewhat because the only thing that the two films have in common is the shared monster Guilala.  Beyond that, there is next to no continuity between the two films.  Short of one joke about a Chinese knockoff spaceship named after the ship found in the first film, the monster is the only similarity that the two films have.  The second film also flips the genre it aims for completely upside down.  The original film was meant to be a drama, although how well it meant that goal can be questioned easily.  The second film is a comedy foremost with some political satire heaved heavily on the side.

                The film begins with the G* Summit being held in Japan.  Eight heads of countries have come together to discuss a number of pressing world issues.  As the group continues their discussions, an unidentified object crashes into Sapporo in northern Japan.  From the fiery carnage, Guilala emerges and brings death and destruction to the city.  The eight take it upon themselves to rid the world of Guilala so that none shall live in terror and that their ratings in the polls will go up.  Meanwhile, two Japanese journalists stumble upon a secret cult of worshipers dancing for their ancient god, Take-Majin.  As they push their inquiry further, they find out that it was foretold since long ago that Guilala was to invade Earth.  Humans would be unable to stop the creature.  Only the god Take-Majin could stop the extraterrestrial monstrosity.  The only problem is that the hero-god is nowhere to be seen in mankind's darkest hour.  Will he appear in time to save us?

The chicken from outer space comes back.

                I have probably written a more dramatic summary than any moment of the film itself.  This is because the film takes itself very lightly.  It is a comedy first and a monster film second.  The center of the film's comedy stems from the antics of the G8 group.  Each of the world leaders is an overly stereotypical cartoon character.  The leader of France is a womanizer who ignores his recent marriage.  The president of the USA is an idiot that cares more about his chances of being reelected than stopping the monster.  The Russian leader utilizes spy tactics to get the job done.  So on and so on, the film lays on these stereotypes to make the audience laugh.  It works quite well because the film does not take any sort of serious jab at anyone in particular.  Even the prime minister of Japan gets made fun of, having to run off to the bathroom constantly throughout the film due to indigestion.

                Beyond the comedy found in the war room, the film makes sure to carry over the silly shenanigans to the Guilala scenes.  The Japanese are the first who attempt to combat the creature by aiming a high powered missile straight at the creature.  This ends up being a poor idea.  Guilala catches the missile before it makes contact and eats the weapon hungrily.  After this, the various other world leaders try one after the other to destroy the beast.  Each manner reflects the comical stereotypes of each country.  I will not ruin any sort of surprises because the effect and failure of each one is a great punch line to each joke.

                There is one major problem with the film.  It stems from the film's subplot or side-plot.  The two journalists take a considerable amount of screen time thought the film.  They find the secret shrine, interact with the mysterious villagers, and find out about Take-Majin.  It all adds up to a good level of exposition to let Take-Maijin appear from out of nowhere.  However, despite their importance to generating information so that the audience can see how the day will truly be saved, they do not really do anything that affects the plot.  Sure, they eventually join the ritual dance, but their dancing is not made clear to have been the tipping point to getting Taka-Majin to appear.  For all we know, the ritual dance would have summoned the hero-god without the help of the two journalists.  They are only there as some sort of audience avatar to see the attack of Guilala from eyelevel.

                The inability of the journalists to make a bigger impact upon the story is not the biggest problem.  The problem is that it acts too much as a cold contrast to the comical half of the film.  Whenever the film covers the G8 Summit, laughter abounds.  There are sly jokes on the side that can be missed and other outlandish ones that are enough to bust a gut.  When the film turns to the reporters, there are no jokes or any sort of silliness.  The tone of the film shifts to being dramatic.  It is not overly dramatic to the point of being a joke itself, but the effect is that the film feels split in two.  It feels like the film was written by two different people.  One wrote the G8 Summit half and the other concentrated on the reporters.  At least it seems that the G8 writer had done the final fight between the two giants.  While the contrast between the two halves are never enough to feel like the film is a pendulum moving in great swings from one extreme to the other, it feels like more of a missed opportunity for there to have been humor in both halves.  The only joke that even comes from the journalist half has to do with the funny dance that is in the ritual.  This joke gets old fairly quickly because of how often it repeats.

                "The Monster X Strikes Back/Attack of the G8 Summit" is a good film if you want to watch a world political satire film.  It is a great film if you want a comedy about government incompetence.  It is an OK film to watch a monster destroy the countryside.  It is very enjoyable even without having watched the first film.  That last bit is probably the most important thing I can say about the film.  The sequel is not a parody of the first, despite the amount of available material to make fun of.  It is a general fun film.  Not even the stiff acting of the English speaking actors can detract from the film.  If anything, the stiff and poor acting makes the scenes funnier a la "The Skeleton of Cadavra," a parody film about bad horror films of old.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

P.S. Next is "The Sword with No Name" (2009).

Entry 122: "The X from Outer Space" (1967)

Dear Internet,

                For starters, I have to clear up a mistake first.  I did not watch and will not review "The Monster X Strikes Back/Attack of the G8 Summit."  Now, before you start to jump on me and begin to start throwing mud at me, there is a perfectly reasonable explanation.  One of the rules of this experiment is that I must have viewed previous works that come before anything I review.  This means that before I could have watched "The Monster X Strikes Back/Attack of the G8 Summit," I must have watched "The X from Outer Space" first.  I have not seen the first film before, so I changed up the film for the day to fix this.  Tomorrow I will follow up with the sequel.  

                "The X from Outer Space" is another one of those giant monster films from across the sea in Japan.  There are miniatures, a guy in a rubber suit, and a horrible English dub that only ended up highlighting the film's flaws than convey the story.  The film begins with a space expedition to Mars, via the Moon, to determine what forced five other crews to end transmissions and go missing.  As they travel into the void of space, the crew find themselves held captive by a magnetic interference by a UFO.  After being held in place for some time, the UFO departs.  The crew finds some unknown compound affixed to the tail of their spaceship.  Cleaning off the material yields a small circular object that the crew brings back to Earth for examination.  In the wee hours of the night, the object disappears with a strange footprint found nearby.  Later, a building tall creature begins to wreak havoc upon the Japanese mainland as it feeds on electricity and radiation.  The only hope lies upon re-creating the compound that will cause the creature to revert to an egg state.

                This might not seem like such a bad premise if it was not for everything that I left out.  The film revolves heavily around the crew more than the monster.  This is not a bad thing upon itself.  The original "Godzilla" remembered to center its story on a cast that pushed the story along more than the monster.  The problem here is that the cast of characters are unbelievable to the point that their behavior breaks the storyline.  There is a four man crew that pilots the spaceship AAB Gamma.  I remember the name of the ship because it is repeated throughout the film whenever a radio call goes out from the ship, Earth, or the Moon base, usually three times in one breath whenever it is mentioned.  The crew of the ship often disregards the orders of the captain, trying to do what they think is best instead of doing what they are told.  Take for example the replacement doctor that has to replace the first doctor who turns ill when traveling in space.  The replacement is reluctant to go on the mission to the point that he might have been considered to be insubordinate already.  When he travels with them in space, the ship gets caught in the magnetic beam, making the ship stay still despite the efforts of the ship's rockets.  The captain decides to not use the rockets because they are ineffective and the use thereof will eat up vital fuel.  The replacement doctor decides that this is not the best idea, runs to the ship's controls, and burns through the rest of the ship's fuel.  Or how about we take the ship's biologist.

                The ship's biologist, named Lisa, is the most memorable character.  This has less to do with her influence on the story and more to do with the fact that she is the token white blond character who sticks out like a sore thumb in a cast of Japanese actors and one or two other white guys.  I do not mind that she is a Western character in a cast of Eastern actors. Making a film about space travel would, and does, require an international level of communication and cooperation to create a sense of believability.   I do not mind that she is one of only two women in the cast.  What I mind is that she is one of the most stereotypical lady-scientists that I have come across.  When the crew is told of how they are going on a mission to determine what caused five other crews to go missing and that they have a high chance of following suite if they are not careful, the film quickly switches gears to one or two of the rest of the space crew swooning over her.  They were just told that there is a good chance of them all dying, but the film wants to interject some comical romantic banter that shows the entirety of the pervious discussion did not sink into their heads.  When they are in space, she does not like to take orders from the captain, wanting to treat the sick doctor instead of rushing him to the base like the captain wants.  When they want to go outside the ship to investigate the goop, she refuses to stay behind like instructed and goes out to examine the material.  Eventually, another woman appears that has some interest in the ship captain.  The female jealousy meter goes off more than the Geiger counters in this film before the final conclusion.  Then there is the whole incident where her leg gets pinned under some fallen debris.  Less than five minutes after a team of people get her out from under, she is walking around pretty comfortably for what had appeared as a broken leg.  She makes a few advances in the plot by actually analyzing the various compounds, but those moments are glossed over more for the scenes that highlight her femininity rather than her intelligence.

                The film's special effects are a big problem.  The miniatures are done well enough that you will "Ooo" and "Ah" at seeing a mountain explode and get excited when seeing the tanks roll in. The rest of the sets are enough to make you laugh at the film rather than with it.  In numerous spots in the film, there are computer consoles that operate machinery.  They all are a maze of unlabeled buttons, glowing lights, and knobs.  Nothing seems to have any sort of real purpose other than to give the impression that the workers know what everything does.  The only identifiable item on any console was on the spaceship.  There was a gauge that appeared similar to a turn and balance indicator or a gyro horizon on a plane.  It showed the amount of rocking that was occurring on the ship at any one time.  This leads to one of the most notable problems with the film.  Every time the ship is traveling in space, it rocks back and forth as if it were on the ocean.  The camera tilts back and forth to drive home this point to the point that I began to feel seasick at one point.  The characters even stumble a bit from this swaying motion.  Maybe it is a side effect from having artificial gravity in the ship, but it is hardly better than when there is no gravity and objects "float" around like being held on fishing wire.  

It was probably next to the cup holder.

                The film's monster is not much better.  In fact it is probably one of the worst looking Kaiju I have seen.  It has the head of a tropical parrot, arms that look like they are made from a flat worm, antennae from a bug, and is pudgy in the limbs.  The final effect is a laughable monster that at least is able to destroy the various tanks and airplanes that came after it.  That is not much of a compliment considering that every other Kaiju can do that as well.  Occasionally, we see the monster Guilala attacking people in the same screen.  At that point you can cue the off scale hand or foot that reaches in from off camera, sometimes at the wrong angle from where the limb would have been located for that shot.  Guilala at least has a large enough amount of abilities to make it feel unique at first.  It absorbs a number of different energy forms to power itself, has a fireball breath, and is neigh invulnerable short of one Achilles heel chemical.  Other than the one unique weakness, it feels too much like the Godzilla of later films that feeds off nuclear energy to heal itself.  This might have more to do with the time placement of when this film was made, so I will not discount this against the lumbering beast.

Our lumbering behemoth chasing a car.

                The film's music is always out of place whenever the spaceship is showcased.  There is some ska/lounge music/easy listening song that plays during these moments that completely subtracts away from the space age theme that the film is trying to go for.  This rolls into the scenes that the characters are lounging around or attending celebratory parties.  These scenes are dated straight to the time that the film was in production as a showcase of the fads of that time.  Retrospectively, they make the film show its age.  Looking at the film even within the context of a space film makes it seem out of place because there is no indication that the timeframe of the story is thrown into the future.  It is like assuming that ladder sunglasses are still a thriving trend forty years from now.  

                "The X from Outer Space" should have stayed there.  It is a laughable film that is not notable for anything but its faults.  The film fails in everything it tries to do and forgets to entertain.  I found myself bored and hoping that the monster would stampede over everyone.  I do not think anyone even died, short of those five unnamed crews before the film began.  Worse than that, the film completely ignores the UFO that repeatedly interfered with the spaceships.  Was it some sort of alien bouncer keeping the humans from getting into Club Mars?  We will never know, nor does the film even acknowledge their presence at the close.  The film mutely says, "Just ignore it," something that I would exactly say about this film.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

Entry 104: "Ghost in the Shell" (1995)

Not to be confused with "A Bird in the
the Hand" of similar triangles.

Dear Internet,

                The "Ghost in the Shell" franchise is perhaps one of the keystones of modern anime.  Whether or not you like it, you have to admit that its impact upon an international scene is one of the biggest of its kind.  From the original three volumes of manga, there are two movies with a third on its way, two television series with a made for TV movie, and three video games.  On top of that are a number of OVAs and subsequent mangas that I will not even try to count up.  The vast bulk of this material has been translated into English and been distributed throughout the world.  This long reaching effect of "Ghost" marks it as one of the biggest works that also helped cause the late 90's anime boom that continued to the mid 00's.

                The film, "Ghost in the Shell," follows around Major Motoko Kusanagi and the rest of Section 9, a special enforcement agency that is a part of the government to combat the new type of terrorism that has sprung up.  In the not too distant future, human beings are able to transplant their minds into cybernetic bodies.  With only a little brain tissue being all that stops them from being pure machine.  These individuals are able to enter into the vast informational networks that link the world together.  Along with this ability, the robotic bodies are vastly more physically powerful than their biological counterparts.  Enter in the Puppet Master, an international digital terrorist that uses others to commit his crimes for him.  He does so by implanting false memories into his pawns to make them do his work for him.  A garbage man who believes he is spying on his wife is actually a single man who is being manipulated into trying to hack into the police network.  "Ghost" follows a single case of Section 9 and attempts to examine the various problems of a cyborg future.

                This is not the first time that I have come across this film.  This is about the third time that I have sat down to watch it.  Now before you start throwing biomechanical organs at me, Internet, let me explain.  I have sat down to watch this film in both dub and subtitle formats.  Both times I fell asleep.  Now this does not mean that the show was boring.  It was just that unless you sit down and watch it uncut, you will most likely get bored and chance the channel, which is partially what made me fall asleep both times.  This film is one that requires your full attention without distractions.  Early on, it sets out to create its cyberpunk world.  Immediately afterwards, it delves into the political problems that occur within that world.  For one thing, an escaping programmer fleeing a country through the use of diplomatic immunity is the same as smuggling arms out of the country.  The importance of what a single programmer can accomplish must be astounding given this level of importance to them.  Considering that even today, programmers with inside workings of how you work, Internet, and who you report to are running from one country to another, there is some truth to the film.

                Visually, the film is fantastic.  I do not mean merely the quality of the animation, but I will address that first anyway.  The animation is split from 2D rendering and 3D rendering.  There are plenty of CG graphics that dot the picture.  It almost requires it for certain sequences.  For a film that touches heavily upon a world that is neck deep in technology, using computer graphics to make a visual point about that technology is a no-brainer.  The characters move smoothly, without choppy motions.  The backgrounds are detailed plenty to show the Hong Kong of the future, filled with a flooded city at its bottom with a sprawling metropolis at the top.  However, what really takes the cake is the films visual language.

Late in the film, there is a visual display of technology destroying the past.

                The opening title credit sequence is intermixed between the title cards and the process of creating a cybernetic shell.  Specifically, it is the shell that the Major uses in the film.  The viewer is able to see how a person goes from only a few bits of brain tissue to a machine of the future.  In those few minutes, the film sets the stage for the viewer.  It is a quick rundown of all the inner workings of a cyborg, from the brain to the skin.  What makes it more interesting is that the Major seems to wake up from dreaming this sequence.  The viewer is then able to not only associate the robot-man making process with that specific character but also gain an awareness that the process is something that weighs heavily upon that specific character.  I will get to that in a minute.  At the same time, the film's soundtrack is able to take center stage.

                The film's music is haunting.  It does not rely on a futuristic soundtrack filed with synthetic beeps and electronic sounds, or at least from what I remember it did not.  No, the main showcase in the music department is the eerie vocals that echo throughout.  The lyrics are apparently formed from Yamato kotoba, or old Japanese vocabulary.  This use of an older language to make the language used in the music creates a hard contrast to the futuristic setting the story takes place in.  However, it brings up another point on the film.  Similar songs, if not the same one, play in at least two other sequences in the film.  Both of these sequences are montages of the setting.  No plot takes place or is minimal at most.  These sequences show off the setting with the backdrop of the music.  While at first I started to think that these were slowing down the pace of the film too much, I started to find them enchanting because they were taking time to present the world to the viewer.  It is not a pretty one, not in the least, but if the film sped by them for the sake of the plot, it would have discounted itself.  If the film only presented the high technology side of the city, it would be ignoring the have-nots of the future.  If the film only showed the city's gutters, it would cause the viewer to miss out the technological wonders that are central to the film.  These slower sequences are also there usually when a character is traveling, so it makes sense for the audience to get a glimpse of the world the characters exist in, especially considering that the action oriented scenes are very fast paced.

                Finally, there are the show's philosophical aspects.  The All Knowing Wiki even has a dedicated article for the franchise's philosophy.  So, it would be make this entry lacking if I did not even touch upon it.  As I said, the Major is weighted heavily with her own nature as a cybernetic being.  She wonders if she was ever human.  Considering that even in the film, memories can be created and implanted with ease enough by the antagonist, there is a possibility that she is a product of the police department to create a soldier.  At the same time, she wonders if she is even alive anymore after having her consciousness implanted into a mechanical body.  Indirectly, the question of whether or not the soul is tied to the body or the mind is brought up in the film.  This in turn brings up more questions.  If a person's consciousness can be completely digitized, does that mean it can be copied?  If it can be copied, does that mean the new entity is a human?  If that new entity is a human, does it then have a soul?  The film does not go too deep down the rabbit hole, thankfully.  If it did, we might be here for three or more days.  Maybe that is something that the TV show does, but that will be another day.  Right now is the film.  And the film tackles these philosophical questions with caution and fear, as is customary to the human condition.  By the end, it does not answer many of them.  This seems to be somewhat of a cop-out considering if it only asks questions of the viewer it can come across less like a professor at college testing his students and more an annoying 5 year old constantly asking "Why?"  However, the film is not a shallow mocking of the viewer, but a rightful challenge to figure out an answer before such questions arise as technology progresses.  

                "Ghost in the Shell" is one of those films that does just about everything right.  It world builds, it creates a suspenseful narrative, it has energetic action scenes, and it leaves the viewer with something to ponder about.  It is the kind of film that makes me want to hear more about the story's world and the characters in it.  As a work based off a manga, it succeeded in generating interest in the source material that helped it spawn off more works.  The film is worth its time and warrants more.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

P.S. Next is "The Lower Depths" (1957).