Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. I hit a nice personal milestone this week, as I finally reached the end of my annual “get off your ass and out jogging” progression chart, meaning I am apparently qualified to run a 5k. This feels nice in an intellectual sense, even if it conflicts with my own physical impression of my body as a rancid, decaying husk, and I’m gonna do my absolute best to keep that energy going through the months to come. Meanwhile, my house just finished up Magical Knight Rayearth, leaving us once again in search of a worthy legacy production. Given my last two summers were shared with Sailor Moon and Slayers, whatever comes next has some big shoes to fill, so I’d appreciate any recommendations regarding classic (or recent, I’m not picky) anime to munch through. In the meantime, let’s burn down the week in review!
First up this week was Beast of War, a recent creature feature set during the second world war, centered on a group of young Australian soldiers just shipping off for the Pacific theater. Unfortunately, their ship is immediately sunk by Japanese fighters, leaving them adrift among the burning wreckage in the midst of an endless fogbank. What’s more, they are not alone in their plight; for the chaos on the surface has summoned a hungry predator, a massive great white shark.
Beast of War is a tightly wound fish-feast that also aspires to be a meditation on the futility of war, with largely engaging if not exactly profound results. Setting its first act at boot camp does a fine job of texturing the central personalities, making the subsequent parade of carnage feel grounded in genuine personal bonds. Just as importantly, the film constructs a fine procession of mechanical challenges to torment its heroes, shifting gears whenever any one scenario has fulfilled its purpose, and rationing out deaths while persistently raising the temperature among the surviving soldiers.
I felt the film’s attempt to sort of reverse-engineer a revenge/redemption arc for its protagonist entirely via flashbacks was basically a dud, and thus its finale felt more obligatory than inevitable, but otherwise had a fine time with a film that for the most part successfully elevates crunchy creature feature fundamentals. The bones are solid; if you’re in the mood for “squad disintegrates under pressure from a giant pissed-off fish,” you will not be disappointed.
We then screened The Atomic Submarine, a mid-century scifi feature set in a near-future where advances in oceanography have opened a variety of arctic routes for shipping and travel. There’s just one problem: some mysterious craft keeps blasting our vessels, challenging our rule of the northern reaches. Thus it is up to the atomic submarine Tigershark and her top-notch crew to investigate, a mission that culminates in a confrontation with a force from another world.
The Atomic Submarine proved an exceedingly efficient thriller, managing to pack a surprising density of submersible-focused scheming and action into a seventy minute shell. As with many of its ‘50s contemporaries, it’s a film that underlines how the essence of scifi monster movies is often less the monster in question than the corresponding mission briefings, as grim-faced professionals debate countermeasures for dealing with a threat beyond human imagining. There’s a whole lot of that, alongside some alternately charming and gruesome practical effects when humanity ultimately comes face-to-eyeball with its interstellar adversary. The film essentially excises the human element often appended to such features (the theoretical love story is resolved in the first couple of scenes, and the crewmen mostly embody tactical roles or philosophical archetypes), and through doing so offers a sleek, propulsive slice of mid-century scifi thrills.
Next up was Dead End Drive-In, a dystopian Australian drama directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith. In order to deal with rampant unemployment and gangs of restless youths, the Australian government takes the novel approach of setting up one-way drive-ins, wherein young couples and other unsavory elements find themselves imprisoned in lobster cage-like prison camps. Pacified by junk food, movies, and drugs, most prisoners ultimately grow to accept their cage – but our protagonist Jimmy Rossini (Ned Manning) won’t stand for it, and thus commences his one-man drive-in prison break.
Dead End Drive-In serves up an exceedingly bleak slice of Australian apocalyptica, presenting youthful rebellion as a dead end as soul-destroying as the film’s titular internment camp. Considering how many films champion youth in revolt as rebels or freedom fighters by refusing to follow them beyond that first moment of sneering rebellion, I quite appreciated this film’s cynical alternative, as it explored how cycles of revolt and disenchantment can easily lead to a nihilistic detachment from any hope for the future.
The film readily agrees that governmental authorities and policemen are not our friends; they are defenders of capital, designed to shepherd productive workers into their cages while shoving the rest of us off a cliff. But only our protagonist seems to have any energy to push against this rigged system; his fellow youths have accepted they will never amount to anything, and instead bicker over the scraps provided to them, making a nest in the wreckage and directing their ire towards those they can actually hurt – people who challenge their passivity, or the foreigners they see as “stealing” the meager inheritance that is rightfully theirs.
Through this approach, the film offers a significantly more world-weary and incisive portrait of our own late-capitalist hellscape, echoing the ethno-nationalism that so many global underclasses have embraced in lieu of revolt against the tyranny of capitalism. Poverty does not make us righteous; it can often make us fearful and tribalistic and mean, as we scrape for whatever is left after the master has had his feast. Given this relentlessly dour approach (aided mightily by the film’s convincingly dilapidated central venue), the final, momentary rebellion of our protagonist actually feels richly satisfying – not because we think he might win forever, but because in a world like this, even that one moment of righteous exhalation before the return of reality is a precious thing indeed.
Alongside our film screenings, we also just finished a watch-through of the original Magic Knight Rayearth. Based on a manga by Clamp, the series centers on Hikaru, Umi, and Fuu, three teenage girls who find themselves transported from Tokyo Tower to the mystical land of Saphiro. Meeting with a diminutive sage, they are informed they are destined to become magic knights, and ultimately pilot the titanic Rune Gods to save this realm from the forces of darkness.
Magic Knight Rayearth exemplifies Clamp’s gift for cross-demographic genre-mixing fantasy, combining an isekai pitch with magical girl narrative conventions, high fantasy worldbuilding, and even some bombastic mecha action. Its fundamentals are exceedingly strong, which makes it somewhat disappointing that the show rarely extrapolates on them; particularly for the first season, it follows a predictable “acquire the sacred relics” arc festooned with episodic meddling villains, doing little to add much texture to either its central characters or allegedly magical world. I found myself wishing the show would commit to either the character-driven episodic narratives of its magical girl roots or the worldbuilding-rich possibilities of its isekai pitch; caught in an awkward middle ground, its episodes rarely offer more than “we need to get an object, and a bad guy wants to stop us.”
Things pick up a fair bit in the second season, when the assumptions of their initial quest are flipped, and three nations send their own distinctive champions to claim Saphiro’s treasure. And the show’s vivid art design means it’s always a relatively engaging viewing experience, with plenty of flourishes in terms of special attacks and mechanical animation. Umi and Fuu also come into their own as characters over time, eventually rising to serve as convincing bridges between disparate cultures. Ultimately, I enjoyed the show well enough to wish it realized more of its potential; still, even in this form, it remains a charming relic of both Clamp’s heyday and the original isekai template.
