Rewatch: The Sky Crawlers

This is a film that you have to either go into blind and alone or with enough information to realise what you're getting into. If the extent of your knowledge is that The Sky Crawlers somehow involves aeroplanes then go, watch it, and come back here later. If you're not planning to see it or you've already been spoiled, read on.

So, okay, it's called Sky Crawlers, the case features bullets and fire and swooshing hair, this movie is lying to you from the very first. Despite the title's implication there is a sad lack of vast Eldritchian insects tearing through the stratosphere (darn.) and the violent, frantic tone set by the opening is... misleading.

We start off with a dogfight that hammers home Sky Crawlers' main quality. This thing is beautiful.

I mean, astoundingly, ethereally gorgeous.

The visual style is a jarring blend of highly rendered CGI props and landscapes

with soft, simple, understating and pastel-coloured character design.

Unlike Steamboy, it doesn't even attempt to blend these disparate elements and sets a precedent for the "feel" of the story as a whole. We're following Yuichi, a boy (as in child, which I'll get to later) inheriting his predecessor's fighter jet, and the newest addition to this odd little group of pilots.

He asks a few questions, especially about the status of the pilot he's replacing, Jinro, and makes little headway. Everyone is quiet and cryptic. One of his new partners, the friendly Naofumi, shows him the sights. The sights include a diner that makes good meat pies and... a brothel. Huh.

The pair of prostitutes are no less enthusiastic when it comes to reinforcing the vague-and-mysterious theme. Yuichi retires with the darker and more tattooed of the two, who intimates to him that Jinro used to visit her, and that Yuichi reminds her of him.

The rest of the tale develops slowly and strangely, punctuated by aerial battles. Yuichi tries to question his superior officer, Suito Kusanagi, but only gets his information in snippets. Everyone stares, everything is awkward, the soundtrack hasn't graced us with its presence since the opening and only resurfaces later in the form of Kusanagi's giant, slightly terrifying music box.

All the while, our characters are going off to fight faceless enemies and occasionally they don't come back. Kusanagi seems to be the only one with a real reaction to this. Tourist groups pose for pictures with the aircrafts, the fights are all blithely broadcast on the news... it's all a very calm kind of war.

In order to skip all this vague description, allow me to spoil the whole twist right now.

The pilots are synthetic people called "Kildren". They are immortal unless outright killed. They are being used to act out a sort of mock war, a play put on for a warless world to remind the populace of how important peace really is. A real, immediate reminder of conflict with real (albeit disposable and inhuman) casualties. When they die, they are reincarnated with simple false memories, retaining their use as pilots in an unending cycle.

The revelation if this is an unwinding, letting us in on small implications before it confirms anything. I like this setup.

And I would have liked it better if it hadn't been WRITTEN OF THE BACK OF THE VIDEO CASE.

Oh, wow, that's nice. I didn't want to wait for any of that, just go ahead and tell me in that stilted, preview-narrator way of yours. Thanks.

Okay, so that sort of wrecked my first viewing. With the knowledge that: 1. Kildren are immortal child-things. 2. They are fighting an endless war. And 3. Something weird happened to the pilot Yuichi is replacing I expected the rest of the film to be a big science fiction spectacle with mysteries solved and deaths avenged and conspiracies unveiled and all that good stuff. The idea of watching a character make surreal, existantial discoveries becomes a lot more appealing when we are not told the results before we hit play.

When I finished watching Sky Crawlers the first time around, I was annoyed. I'm glad, however, that I took the time to go through it a second time and really look at it, pay attention to it, and understand what it had to offer. Planes explode and guns are brandished, but this is not an action adventure. It's set in an alternate world of manufactured child-soldiers, but it's not a sci-fi fantasy. I wouldn't even call it a regular "commentary" piece, despite its lapses out of subtlety. It's just about watching these characters act and interact. Experiencing with them the disconnected, vague, dreamlike quality of a world full of endless repetitions and forgettings. If anything, it reminds me a bit of Stalker, and has crept its way into my list of favourite films. One I'll definitely be watching again.

That said, this is far from perfect. The most interesting problem I found was with our smoking, drinking, occasionally sexual main characters. I get what the idea is, constantly confronting us with the debauchery of "children" who might die tomorrow and are unaffected by normal societal rules. The thing is... with the anime aesthetic, even with this more grounded style, how much of a visual difference is there between a thirteen-year-old and an eighteen-year-old? The characters have low, mature voices, some have tired lines around their eyes... there isn't enough to distinguish them as intentionally children and not just young people. It makes it a little confusing if you don't know what you're supposed to be seeing.

A final note before I finish this up; part of what bumped this into the territory of real re-watch value. I really like the relationship between Yuichi and Suito.

What we eventually get explained is that Suito and Jinro were lovers. Suito, having lived a fair bit longer than the other Kildren and caught on to the cycle of repetition, kills Jinro at his behest to "release" him. Only to have him come back as Yuichi. The clashing of Yuichi's hazy, apathetic calm and Suito's increasingly desperate and destructive recklessness is interesting to watch.

It feels heavy and real, and it caught my attention more than I had expected.

In conclusion, give this a watch if you like fabulous animation and aren't afraid of a story that tries to hypnotise rather than entertain you. Preferably watched without any distractions.

The Sky Crawlers is © 2009 Layout and Design Sony Pictures Home Entertainment inc. All rights reserved.

Les Revenants.

This movie really, really irritated me. I’m not even going to put screenshots in this post, because I don’t want to spend the time picking through the scenes.

Not that it was fantastically terrible, oh no! But because I was entirely ready to sing its praises until, literally, the last second of the film.

But let’s start from the beginning. The premise is lovely in its simplicity: everyone who has died in the last ten years is, suddenly and without explanation, back. They just walk back into town, totally unharmed and apparently with no memory of their respective deaths. What follows is an examination of society’s reaction to their return. The government is trying to complete a census, the medical community is trying to study them, and their surviving relatives are trying to deal with their emotions. Suddenly, companies are required to return jobs that have already been taken, and the pensions of retirees must be reinstated. It soon becomes apparent that the revenants are a little ‘off’. They stare vaguely into space, and do not seem to entirely comprehend the present. One doctor forms the theory that their intelligence is an illusion, and that they are simply echoing fragments of their past experience. It is also found (through a surveillance system that tracks the revenants through their slightly lower body temperature) that they seem to have boundless energy, wandering slowly through the night with no apparent goal.

Slowly, we begin to see that something more sinister is afoot. The revenants gather in odd ‘meetings’, repeating the same information about a route to a set of tunnels we hear about throughout the movie. It all comes to a head one night when they set out in full force, quietly making their way to the tunnels while repeating the instructions: “past a brightly lit store… we can open it together…”  They enter the tunnels in small groups, but by now there have been a few incidents, and the military is starting to react with a concentrated version of a drug previously used to keep the revenants more docile. The drug is dispersed as a gas, and we see them try to escape more hurriedly. A number of them fall. The woman whose attempts to adjust to her returned lover we’ve been following is taken to the tunnels. She wanders in the dark for a while and is eventually abandoned, resurfacing as the sun comes up. The busses, which transported the revenants when they first arrived, now hold their comatose bodies. They are laid out upon their gravestones. There are less than three minutes left in the film. I count them, eagerly awaiting the last, shocking twist. Where are the revenants? What are they trying to open in the tunnels? What could possibly happen next?

13… 12… 11… The bodies on the tombstones slowly begin to turn transparent and fade. I am bewildered. 9… 8… 7… The woman steps out of her shower. She wipes the steam methodically from the mirror to reveal her face. She smiles.

Roll credits.

 

What.

 

What?

 

What the hell, movie?

This thing was damn near a work of art. The soundtrack was sparse and tense. The pacing was just slow enough to be suspenseful. The mood seemed to build, to writhe like some vast monster beneath the surface of the movie, and then…

It’s like the director just gave up. Looked at what he’d done and said: “Pffft… to hell with this. Let’s go have some sandwiches.”

I felt genuinely robbed.

My conclusion: Don’t see Les Revenants. Everything that is good about it comes crashing down in so ignominious a way as to render the whole thing a failure. Seriously, just… just go watch Twilight. At least then, you’ll know before you sit down that you’ll be ripped off.

 

Spin.

Les Revenants is © to Haut and Court.

She.

Oh my goodness, this film just kind of personifies the mildly bad things about old adventure flicks. It isn’t… terrible… It’s just amusingly inane. It stars Randolph Scott, whose name I can’t say without drama due to a few too many viewings of Blazing Saddles, and who, for a brief while, wears a very nice suit. 

It also stars that chap who played Watson in the bad Sherlock Holmes series, who plays… erm, a bungling, dim-witted sidekick. 

His parents must have been so proud.

Anyhow. The story starts with Leo Vincey (Scott) coming to see his dying uncle, who tells him a tale of the ‘Flame of Life’, which he and Watson have discovered is probably real. He tells Vincey that he must trek out to find it. My first question here is: why? Is Vincey a scientist? An adventurer? What exactly qualifies him for this mission?

Never you mind that, for Vincey and Watson quickly depart for somewhere cold and stop by at the local Plot Point’s house for supper, and to procure the help of some local guides. Plot Point turns out to be an utter prat. And also a racist. And he treats his daughter badly. It is at this point I call out my bet that he will die within the next few scenes.

Sure enough, he gets smushed by an avalanche as he tries to hack through some ice to get at a bag of gold left by the less-fortunate (but remarkably well-preserved) companion of the first traveler to try and find the Flame.

Luckily, the avalanche also cleared the way to a cave-path through the mountain.

While passing through, our heroes (now with the ill-treated daughter in tow) are set upon by savage cave dwellers, who try and put a hot metal thingy on Watson’s head.

During this scene, and many thereafter, you may notice something significant about the cast. That is: They all have the intellectual quotient of a soggy parsnip. Really. They’re just dim.

But anyhow. Vincey gets hit on the head and swoons,

only to be saved by a group of fellows dressed in fashionable togas 

and brought into the underground city before the mysterious She. 

She (Who Must Be Obeyed) turns out to be a gossamer-clad immortal queen, who is played by the actually-quite-lovely Helen Gahagan.

Incidentally, this is the only movie Ms. Gahagan did in her entire career. Something of a pity, as she’s also the only character I came to like. Upon seeing Vincey, she proclaims that he is a reincarnation of her long lost love and tells him that she will reveal unto him the secrets of The Flame and take him as her king. Initially, Vincey is quite content with this offer and tells his compatriots to go on their way. But wait! Tanya (daughter of the plot point) hath become quite smitten with our intrepid hero! She attempts to sway him with rather non-tempting talk about how real love means growing old and dying together. A point, but badly made. 

To make a long story short, Vincey realises the wickedness of She’s ways after she tries to sacrifice Tanya, who approached her with a plea for Vincey’s freedom. They try to escape, only to bump into She in the room of The Flame itself. She repeats her offer to Vincey, who still seems a little tempted, but Watson and Tanya urge him against it, saying the fire might be a trap. In order to prove otherwise, She steps into the flames, only to grow older with each flash of fire.

All the while, she talks of how Tanya will eventually wither while Vincey remains young, and that he will no longer want her then. After the last burst of fire, she staggers to the ground, shriveled and ancient, and dies.

Ignominiously.

At this point, I’m staring at the television set with total bewilderment. Vincey, Watson (oh alright… his name is Holly in this movie.), and Tanya are back in London in the next scene, discussing their fabulous adventure and how no one will believe them.

Here, they theorize about how She met her demise. Perhaps, they say, the overexposure to the Flame’s radiation was too much for her. Or perhaps her existence was unnatural, and a higher power had ended it. This strikes me as cheating, somehow. I think the director decided to re-write at the last minute or something.

In the interest of fairness, this film did have some good points. The sets were really interesting, and the role of She was played rather well. With that bit over, here are the points of most confusion:

Why, why, why was everyone in this movie so dumb? Holly was just supposed to be some sort of comic relief, and I think Tanya was supposed to be naïve and pure, but Vincey? He was the hero! One rather assumes that he would be gifted with at least a knack for tactical decisions… Even She Who Must be Obeyed had some baffling lapses in judgement. Why, for example, did she not simply kill Tanya in some dark passage rather than trotting her out where she could be rescued? And how exactly did she not notice the fact that she was decomposing with unnatural speed in her last moments?

Also, the romantic plot with Tanya was just… Uncomfortable. She and Vincey had only known each other for about two days. When did she have time to fall so hopelessly in love? As well, their first real discussion involved Vincey making some awkwardly paternal remarks, and that set the whole thing off on the wrong note.

And finally, mulling over the plot now, I have to wonder why Vincey didn’t just accept She’s offer? You’re a man of science, for heaven’s sake! Couldn’t you imagine the possibilities? This woman has been around since before Christ and doubtlessly has a wealth of knowledge no one else would possess. Your time with her would also be basically unlimited! Think of the places you could see, and the events you could witness at her side!

But alas. He shuns her gauzy embrace for that of the waif with dubious emotional maturity.

In conclusion, I would encourage you to watch She with a few good friends, and laugh at its bemusing majesty.

Spin.

 

She is © 2006 to Legend Films Incorporated.