Death Note 2017: What The Hell Happened

Sometimes, being right sucks.

A little while ago, I finally watched Netflix' adaptation of Death Note. Going in, I had nothing in the way of expectations - if you read my entry regarding my reactions to the teaser I did a few months ago, you know exactly what I assumed this movie was going to be. Not only were my predictions entirely vindicated, but the film, somehow, managed to be even worse than it lead me to believe. The only appropriate reaction one can have after witnessing such a colossal failure of an adaptation is precisely the one I used to name this post: What the hell happened?

To be frank, answering that question is going to require scrutinizing virtually every aspect of the film, so let's start at the beginning. I won't go into too much detail setting up the plot (read my previous post for any relevant plot details), but one thing that bears repeating is that the creative team decided to alter the setting from Tokyo to Seattle - more specifically, a Seattle high school. I stand by my previous opinion that this change, in itself, isn't a negative one, and that Death Note as a story-concept is universal enough to work in any setting. But the change of setting was more than just a superficial one, and that's where the problems come in - in transferring Death Note to a Seattle high school, the creative team seems to have decided that the characters should be altered to stereotypical American high school students, and in the process they ruined everything positive about them.

Let's start with Light. I describe Light Yagami to be, though the analogy isn't a 1 to 1 correlation, the Japanese equivalent of Walter White - though he uses the Death Note, originally, with somewhat noble intentions, fairly quickly it unleashes within him a latent sociopathy that completely dominates his character for the rest of the story. In Death Note 2017, we instead have Light Turner, who aside from having perhaps the stupidest name in any movie of the past ten years, is an obnoxious kid with daddy issues. His mother died in a hit and run accident, and he holds his father, a higher-up in the Seattle police department, in contempt for never bringing her killer to justice. This, presumably, is where Light Turner's drive to use the Death Note comes from, and while it is something, is far from equivalent to Light Yagami's more philosophical, quasi-religious, and outright terrifying sense of right and wrong.

Moving on, we have Mia Sutton, the film's equivalent to Misa Amane. Say what you will about Misa Amane - while many people find her girly personality and her sycophantic worship (pun intended) of Light as obnoxious, it works, because I'm sure that's how Tsugumi Ohba, Death Note's author, intended her to be. She was a well-written character in spite of those annoyances. Mia Sutton, on the other hand, may be the most bafflingly incoherent character in the movie. Aside from one very brief scene in the beginning when she selflessly confronts a group of bullies, we don't know who she is at all. We're told she's a cheerleader, but aside from the bullying scene I already mentioned, that's the extent of it. Everything else we see regarding Mia concerns her partnership with Light - we can see she has an obvious zeal for Kira's mission, and she acts as an almost Lady Macbeth to Light's Macbeth, but where does that zeal come from? We are given no context, and thus given no reason to care.

Then, there's Ryuk, the Shinigami who becomes Light's companion throughout his diabolical experiment. The manga portrays him as an embodiment the idea of Chaotic Neutral - the entire reason, for instance, why the Death Note winds up on Earth at all is because he (correctly) believes that throwing it into the hands of a random human will alleviate his boredom. In the film? He's simply the Mephistopheles to Light's Dr. Faust. I'm not suggesting that drawing on the Faust mythos is inherently negative - we have hundreds of years of brilliant works of art to counter such as assumption - but the movie does nothing interesting with those Faustian archetypes. It almost felt like Ryuk was rewritten as Mephistopheles simply because that archetype would be more recognizable to a western audience, integrity of the original character be damned.

Anyone who's at all familiar with Death Note will probably find it odd that I have yet to mention one of the series' most famous characters: L. That's because - and this is perhaps the most disappointing aspect of this film - L barely has any purpose in the film. Yes, you heard that right - the character who, in the manga, was probably second only to Light in terms of influence and popularity, is, in this film, so criminally mishandled that his presence is almost negligible. Let me explain.

Sure, I suppose L, unlike the other principal characters, is most like his manga counterpart: he's still the brilliant, eccentric detective who's brought in to assist the police department in catching a criminal who is head and shoulders above anything they're capable of dealing with. Some reviews of the film I've read complain that the movie transformed him from an autistic idiot-savant into a more two (one?) dimensional quirky asshole - there is truth to that, but honestly, that's the least of our problems.  L's startling intelligence was only one facet of his character - most important, I would argue, was his incredible game of cat and mouse he played with Light in his quest to discover the identity of Kira. Simply put, this was the reason why most people read Death Note, and it just doesn't happen in this film. L figures out that Kira is Light almost immediately, and the one noteworthy interaction between the two happens when the two meet up in a diner, where Light has no problem admitting his identity himself.

I know what you're thinking. They took away the Light vs. L chase? That basically was Death Note! If the movie isn't going to be that, then what is it going to be? The answer, basically, is a clusterfuck.

Simply put, Death Note is, at a minimum, three films in one, all of them awful. Since I just spent some time on why it failed as a thriller, I'll move on to why it failed as a horror film, since, above all, I think that's what the creative team was attempting to make. The director, Adam Wingard, is a horror director - not being much of a horror fan, I haven't seen any of his other works. I have heard from basically everyone that his adaptation of The Blair Witch Project was awful, though his earlier works tend to receive praise, so maybe he does have at least some talent. Maybe. But it doesn't show here.

We're introduced to Ryuk, for instance, via a shitty jump scare scene, complete with what is perhaps the most cringe-worthy scream in the history of cinema.

Yeah, not only did a group of editors think it wise not to leave that on the cutting room floor, but a group of Netflix producers said, sure, this is something we feel proud to release to consumers. It gets worse - instead of, as in the manga, focusing on Light's struggles to remain hidden while executing his vengeance, the film spends that time focusing, in excruciating detail, on the deaths of Light's victims. Every single one of them is given a shitty, slow-motion death scene, complete with what seems like gallons of blood and, on at least one occasion, bodily organs flying everywhere. Wingard directs these scenes like he's filming a live-action adaptation of a Mortal Kombat fatality - that may work in Mortal Kombat, where gruesome spectacle is its raison d'etre, but it's fundamentally inappropriate for an adaptation of Death Note.

Besides being inappropriate, the scenes completely fail at being scary. We know the victims are going to die - we just have to wait for it to happen. There's no horror here - at best, the scenes invoke a sense of morbid curiosity with regards to the exact nature of the victim's demise. But again, violent visual spectacle isn't what Death Note is about, and if Wingard had any sort of artistic awareness, he should have known that.

The last paragraph brings up another good point regarding why this film fails as both a horror film and a thriller. The two genres are connected in that each, for their own ends, requires the manipulation of fear and tension to achieve an effect on the audience. That's the fundamental principle of the genres, and it's incredible that Wingard, a horror director, seems to not understand how either fear or tension is manifested. Both require the unknown - you can't be afraid of something if you know what it is or what it's doing, and you can't feel tense if you know what's coming. Neither of those effects are achieved in this film, because Wingard has created a film where the rules governing its world ensure that they can't happen.

Case in point: the Death Note itself. Like in the manga, there are rules governing its use, most famously the rule stating you need to know the real name of the person you want to kill. Light, obviously, can't kill L because L isn't his real name, so a good portion of the film sees him trying to discover that name. Luckily for him, however, the Death Note's rules are such that they eventually allow him to force L's retainer, Watari, into completely abandoning his post, ignore all his calls, retreat to an orphanage where L was raised, sift through the archives of that orphanage to find L's real name, read it to L, and then, after all that, kill himself.

Can you see why this is so awful? The Death Note can't kill anyone without a real name, but if you have that name, you can more or less subject them to absolute mind control. Once Watari is under Light's command, we know exactly what's going to happen, and it does. High-determinism is the antithesis of both horror and thriller, in that there can exist no tension in a set of events that is absolutely preordained.

Embarrassingly, the film's romance plot almost functions better than its horror/thriller plot, and its romance plot is really shitty. What saves it is that, as shitty as it is, it isn't a complete failure of logic like the horror elements are. How ironic is it that Wingard, A HORROR DIRECTOR, let me remind you, gets his romance right more consistently than his horror?

Anyway.

The romance: Mia falls in love (lust?) with Light, because he's a badass megalomaniacal god of vengeance, and wouldn't you know it, righteous indignation happens to be her kink. The issue, of course, is that by the middle of the film, Light starts to have doubts, while Mia, channeling Lady Macbeth, attempts to keep the Kira-spirit alive within him. Like I mentioned before: Light never becomes the Walter White-esque monster he does in the manga. I don't know why - maybe that would have made the film too dark or inaccessible to a certain portion of its audience. In any case - it's obvious that Mia doesn't really love Light, she loves Light-As-Kira. Something could be done with this, but as I said in the beginning, Mia's character is such a blank slate that one can't comprehend what it is that drives her. It makes the romance feel hollow, like another checked box on the list of things Adam Wingard thinks will make the movie popular with clueless high school students across America.

That brings me to what I'm arbitrarily going to make my final point. Wingard's worst, and far and away his most baffling, directorial decision is his four or five times in the film that, for whatever reason, he decides to film the movie like a music video. By this, I mean that these scenes feature, minimal, if any, dialogue, instead composed almost entirely of slow-motion scenes of characters doing dramatic things while 80s music from what I assume was taken from the cutting room floor of Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive plays obnoxiously in the background.

There are a few issues here - I'll start with the choice of music itself. This kind of synthwave, 80s throwback, call it what you will, is undeniably popular, but in this movie, again, it is entirely inappropriate. Honestly, I don't think I can recommend an adequate replacement, because literally no style of music would be appropriate. Michael Jackson's Thriller notwithstanding, when was the last time you were watching a horror film and thought, wow, this could really use a music video? It's such an embarrassment to rational thought that it's almost impressive.

What's worse, Wingard chooses to incorporate these music video scenes in the absolute worst parts of the film. Literally the first scene of the film is a music video. So is the climax, which is so badly shot that the death of a major character caused me to burst out laughing for nearly ten seconds. That's how I remember the end of the movie.

This post has gone on for long enough, so I'll conclude by saying this. I knew I wasn't going to like this film. But Death Note has, beyond all expectations, managed to become the single most surprising film I've seen this year. It is so astonishingly inept in its construction, so blind to the logical tenets of horror and thriller filmmaking, that I'm suddenly not even that angry that it's managed to ruin one of the greatest anime and manga series of the 21st Century. Death Note will unquestionably become a touchstone on how not to adapt an anime series - I hope this blog has convinced you that it should also become a touchstone on how not to make a film in general.

Power Rangers Movie Retrospective (Part 2): Turbo

As the title suggests, this is the second Power Rangers movie retrospective, though it is going to be much different than the first. The original Power Rangers movie is in many ways simple to review - because its entire purpose is to be ridiculous entertainment, it's easy enough to just say how awesome it is. Turbo is not like that. It tries to be something very different than the original, and it just fails. With that, we need to go a little more in depth with regards to what went wrong.

First, a bit of necessary background knowledge. The first Power Rangers movie was non-canon - this movie actually exists to bridge the gap between seasons 4 (Power Rangers Zeo) and 5 (Power Rangers Turbo) of the TV show. Thankfully, the plot of Power Rangers is such that it can be explained very easily with little confusion, even for those unfamiliar with it.

At the end of season 4, the Zeo Rangers defeated the evil Machine Empire, thereby temporarily restoring peace to the earth for the first time since the show's beginning. The Rangers use this time away from fighting evil to, of course, compete in a martial arts competition to try and raise money for a youth shelter. During one of their practices, Rocky, the Blue Ranger, suffers a major back injury, making his future as a Power Ranger very much uncertain.

Meanwhile, on a distant planet, an evil space pirate named Divatox and her crew are trying to capture a wizard named Lerigot. Lerigot, apparently, has a key that can unlock the way to a mysterious hidden island that contains, of course, an ancient malevolent force named Maligore. Don't ask why a friendly wizard is given this key. Also, don't ask why they designed him to look like this.

Anyway, Lerigot eventually flees to earth to try and hide, and Zordon, quickly figuring out what's going on, sends Tommy and Cat, the Red and Pink Rangers, to try and rescue the fugitive wizard.

This whole "chase Lerigot" arc takes up, I'm not kidding, upwards of 30 minutes. Keep in mind the movie itself is only a little over 90 minutes - that's about 1/3 of its runtime being spent on something that a talented director could have accomplished in less than ten minutes. There is absolutely no reason why this arc should have been stretched this long - even if we do get this inadvertently hilarious scene of Lerigot being lead around a jungle by monkeys.

In a way, this one arc encapsulates everything wrong with Turbo as a whole. The original movie knew exactly what it was and what it needed to be - Turbo throws all that away, and attempts to tell a story. Here's the thing - the story of Power Rangers isn't important, nor does it have to be. Every season is a variation on the same formula: evil empire tries to invade earth, Rangers get powers, Rangers fight bad guys, Rangers beat bad guys. What makes Power Rangers good or bad isn't the story, but the spectacle of the fights and compelling characters. The "creative talent" behind this movie disregarded those two things and focused almost exclusively on the one aspect of Power Rangers that matters least.

The Rangers obviously save Lerigot in the end, but he actually ends up going with Divatox anyway, because, surprise surprise, Divatox is holding his wife and baby hostage! So now, the Rangers have to rescue him and stop Divatox' evil plans, and to do it, Zordon says their Zeo powers won't be good enough. They need new Turbo powers.

This pissed me off for a few reasons. My suspension of disbelief is pretty damn high when it comes to Power Rangers plots, as it should be, but the introduction of the Turbo powers was so badly done that I couldn't take it seriously. Apparently, Zordon just had these powers lying around and didn't tell anyone about them until this moment? Normally, the Rangers have to literally travel across time and space to obtain new powers - I guess now Zordon can just create them whenever he wants to? To add insult to injury, the new motif of these Turbo powers is...cars.

Yes, it's car powers. I understand that the original Japanese show Turbo was based on was, in fact, called Carranger, so they didn't really have much of a choice. But Carranger has a few things going for it: first, it's unconnected to the shows that preceded it, and second, from what I understand, it was trying to be a bit more comedic, if not an outright parody. Turbo is a direct sequel and it plays everything dead fucking serious, and it's really hard to take it seriously when it earnestly wants to convince you that the most incredible Ranger power thus far, even more incredible than those based on dinosaurs and mythical beasts, revolves around fucking SUVs.

But hey, as stupid as the concept might be, I think the Zords look pretty neat, and I actually quite like the suit designs, so more power to them, I guess.

Some of you may be thinking: Rocky was injured early in the movie, so what's going to happen to him? Oh, let me tell you. They do, in fact, replace him as the Blue Ranger, and who do they replace him with? Oh, you're not gonna fucking believe it.

This, my friends, is Justin, a 10 year old piece of shit and the new Blue Ranger. If you can't tell by my tone, he's basically the Scrappy Doo of the series - nobody likes him, and the only reason he was even introduced, I'm guessing, is so the young kids watching will have someone they can directly relate to. Well, you know what? I was like 7 when this movie came out, and I had been watching Power Rangers since I was 3, and at no point did I ever feel a prepubescent child was necessary for me to better identify with what I was watching. Even in the show, when he was introduced as the newest Ranger, the other Rangers honestly look pissed off, which made me laugh.

With the team assembled, they head to the island where Divatox hopes to summon Maligore. How do they get there? Why, on this thing, of course!

Now, here's the thing. You're telling me that Zordon can basically make ultra-high tech Zords at will, but to get the Rangers to this island, he needed to use the fucking Queen Anne's Revenge? Why???

It should also be noted that it is only at this point, when we are over an hour into the fucking movie, do we get an actual fight - and honestly, I don't even consider it a real fight, because it's so obviously contextualized in the movie as a joke. But think about it: it takes a goddamn hour, into a fucking Power Rangers movie, for them to have a fight. By this time in the original film, we probably got five or six fights. Clearly, their priorities were in the right place.

We get the first real fight in the penultimate scene of the film, where the Rangers storm the island. It's not a bad fight, but at this point, we as an audience are so worn down by all the boring shit we've seen that we don't really care.

The best scene of the movie comes last, when the Rangers form the Turbo Megazord. It's the best scene because it's the only one in the movie that actually feels like Power Rangers - but hey, it's over in a matter of minutes. And that's more or less the end of the movie - Maligore and Divatox are defeated, the Rangers get accustomed to their new powers, and they win the martial arts competition to boot.

I distinctly remember seeing Turbo in theaters when I was younger, but unlike the original film, I have no good memories, no nostalgia, regarding the experience. Even when I was seven, I wasn't that impressed by what I saw, and it wasn't until now that I've been able to understand why. It's an unfocused, sloppy mess of bad ideas that heralded what is undoubtedly the low point of the series' Zordon Era. I stopped watching the Turbo TV series about half way into its original run, and I didn't watch any of the subsequent series that followed it. Looking back now, the Turbo movie foreshadowed my lack of interest in the series' future - in that sense, Turbo isn't just a bad movie, but the end of the Golden Age of Power Rangers. And for that, I cannot, in good faith, recommend it to anyone.

That Damn Death Note Trailer

Once again, I find myself talking about how badly western filmmakers seem to be at adapting anime and manga. You all remember how baffled I was when I saw the Ghost in the Shell trailer (that movie, incidentally, comes out next Friday) - well, it's been a few months, and history seems to be repeating itself. I was on YouTube earlier today, and lo and behold, I'm recommended the brand new trailer for Netflix' upcoming film adaptation of the legendary Shonen Jump manga Death Note.

Death Note, for those of you who don't know, is the story of a high school student named Light Yagami, who one day finds a Death Note, a magical notebook that can kill anyone whose name is written in it. Armed with this new power, Light decides to use it to basically rid the world of all criminals - the story becomes a giant game of cat and mouse, with Light trying to evade the attention of the many investigators who want to see him dead (most notably, of course, being the eccentric PI named L). It's a phenomenal story - I remember when I was in high school and had just bought the first volume of the manga, I loved it so much that I immediately went back out and picked up the second volume the minute I finished reading the first.

Rumors of an American live action adaptation of Death Note have circulated since, to my knowledge, 2007, but it was only in 2009, when Warner Brothers secured the rights, that work began to begin in earnest. Yes, the film took nearly eight years to be produced - since then, Netflix has picked up the rights from WB. I was initially excited about Netflix' involvement in the project - after all, their work is uniformly both popular and critically acclaimed. But then I remembered: that's only for their TV shows. Their movies? Well, I'll just say Netflix is the same studio that signed a multi-film contract with Happy Madison, and leave it at that.

Why.

That was the first red flag. The second was, shortly before I queued up the trailer, I stumbled over to the film's Wikipedia page to check out the creative team behind it. The director, Adam Wingard, is the same man responsible for the recent Blair Witch film, and the screenwriter, Jeremy Slater, was one of the co-writers of the most recent Fantastic Four film - oh, excuse me, I meant Fan4stic. Come on. Come the fuck on. It's like Netflix is deliberately going out of their way to sign on the most creatively bankrupt team imaginable.

Oh, you don't believe me? Go ahead, watch the trailer - it's only a minute long, so you have no excuse not to.

Yes, only a minute long - it's a teaser, so basically, the only thing we're supposed to get out if it is, one, the movie is coming out soon, and two, LOOK AT ALL THESE COOL PICTURES. I suppose it succeeds well enough at the first point (how could it not?) - as for the second, even with only a minute to work with, the trailer demonstrates the filmmakers don't seem to understand what makes Death Note great.

So, let's get the easy shit out of the way first.

This guy, who looks like he hasn't washed his hair since before 9/11, is I guess Light Yagami (though we aren't told his name in the trailer itself). Like in the manga, he finds the Death Note outside his school one day. Unlike the manga, the very next scene in the trailer makes it clear that the film isn't set in Japan, but in Seattle.

Is this a problem? Yes and no. The core narrative is such that it could conceivably take place anywhere on Earth - indeed, there is at least one Death Note side story that was published years ago that took place in America. It wouldn't be hard - indeed, it would be pretty interesting - to see Death Note's core story injected with some more prototypical American social problems like bullying and societal violence. Is that what they're going to do? Somehow, I don't think so. Look at this.

"Kira" was Light's alter ego in the original manga. In that context, the name was perfect - Kira is a relatively common Japanese name, but it's also the Japanese way of phonetically spelling the English word "killer". It's a pun that makes no sense when translated into an American context. This is a little thing, I know, but at the same time it demonstrates how little the filmmakers cared about treating the material with any kind of artistic integrity and respect. Either keep the film set in Japan, or completely Americanize the entire thing, even if that requires a bit of cosmetic liberty. What this looks like, to me, is they're taking some of the superficial aspects of the story where they see fit.

I say superficial, because the rest of the trailer makes it clear that the filmmakers simply do not comprehend the kind of suspense needed for this story to work. Death Note was great not because there was a bunch of Mission Impossible caliber action and espionage. Tsugumi Ohba's command of dramatic irony is so incredible that he was able to make a bunch of guys sitting around in a room talking and writing a literal life or death struggle. And if you think for a second that sitting around in a room is impossible to make cinematic, you're dead wrong: Madhouse's anime adaptation of the manga is phenomenal, as this brief clip will demonstrate.

So, it can be done. Is that what this movie is doing? Not that I can see. We're shown someone running away maniacally, a ferris wheel collapsing, this asshole escaping the police.

All of this is just generic American action/thriller scenes. How is this Death Note? Granted, Light, or whatever the hell we're calling him, finds the Death Note and is obviously going to use it to kill people, but that doesn't necessarily make the film Death Note. It makes it a dumb action film with a stupid gimmick. Finding and using the Death Note is the most superficial aspect of the story - what makes the story so great is seeing how the Death Note changes Light over time, the tension of both sides trying to outsmart the other, in short, everything except stupid police chases.

One could certainly argue that all that stuff is in the movie, but the trailer decided to focus on other things instead. Perhaps. But to that I say, should a trailer not at least attempt to give an honest look at the movie it's designed to advertise? Can a trailer not be honest and thrilling? What in the silver fuck is this thing?

I foresee one of two possible outcomes. One: the trailer is honest, and the movie is as bad as I've suggested it could be. Or two: the movie is at least a bit closer in spirit to the original source material, making the trailer intentionally misleading. The frustrating thing is not having any idea which of the two is more likely.

Power Rangers Movie Retrospective (Part 1): Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (1995)

So, when I originally reviewed the trailer for the new Power Rangers movie, I decided that I probably wasn't going to watch it. But, I changed my mind - I figured it would be a cool thing for the blog if I were to review not only that movie, but also the other two Power Rangers movies from the 90s, and then compare them all. I'm probably not going to pay any money for the new one, though. Just sayin'. Anyway, let's start at the beginning, at the 1995 Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers movie.

Now, I need to say a few things in the interest of full disclosure. I fucking love this movie, unironically, unapologetically. I saw this movie multiple times when it was in theaters, bought it immediately after it came out on VHS, and have probably seen it a hundred times. Nostalgia has completely impeded my ability to give any sort of objective review to this thing. That being said, I'll at least try not to sound like an idiot fanboy - despite my nostalgia, I genuinely believe, for a Power Rangers movie, it's everything it needs to be.

I assume anyone reading this is already familiar enough with Power Rangers to not need me to explain the plot, but I do need to say one thing up front. Much like, say, most of the Dragon Ball Z movies, this movie is totally non-canon. It's a stand alone story that exists purely to be awesome. Anyway, onto the movie!

Like I said in my earlier blog post, the movie starts, after a brief overview of the history of the Power Rangers, with a goddamn skydiving scene set to the Red Hot Chili Peppers covering Stevie Wonder.

This scene has absolutely fucking nothing to do with anything that comes after it, yet to me, it's emblematic of why I love the movie so much. It's ridiculous spectacle (emphasis on ridiculous), it knows it, and it revels in it. This is why I, and so many others my age, fell in love with Power Rangers in the '90s, and the movie nails it in literally the first scene.

During this initial skydiving scene, two of the divers, the lovable idiots Bulk and Skull, wind up landing in a massive construction site, where workers inadvertently unearth the prison-pod of an ancient force of evil called Ivan Ooze. Zordon tries to warn the Rangers about Ooze, but Lord Zedd and company end up freeing him before they can do anything about it.

A word about this guy. Yes, his name is dumb, and hardly suggests the primeval galactic terror the movie makes him out to be. But honestly, he's probably one of the most effective Power Rangers villains I've seen, especially thus far in the series. See, most Power Rangers villains, though billed as evil, come across as more goofy and incompetent than threatening, because it's a kids show and we can't scare those precious precious childrens watching every week! Lord Zedd is the perfect example of this philosophy in action: at the beginning of Season 2, he was legitimately frightening. So frightening, in fact, that parents requested that they make him less scary, and, goddammit, Saban caved. After that he basically became the male Rita Repulsa.

Ivan Ooze, for whatever reason, completely avoids that pitfall. Sure, he's goofy and cracks jokes, but he's also genuinely psychotic. This is a guy who will reference The Brady Bunch reunion while causing massive collateral damage, and who will eventually order a group of brainwashed adults to commit suicide because he's bored with them. Seriously. His bizarre sense of humor seems less like they're trying to tone him down, and more like they're trying to make him a genuine threat - the goofy references he makes completely divorce him from the moral darkness of his actions. There are probably a good number of real life psychopaths who act kind of like he does.

Anyway, he wakes up, and sends his ooze henchmen to fight the Rangers in the construction site. This is the first real action scene of the movie, but damn, do they keep coming after this. The majority of this movie is action scenes - I count six actual action scenes, but if we include things like the skydiving scene, the rollerblading scene (again, completely unnecessary, but ridiculous spectacle), and the parent suicide scene, we can bump it up to nine, and I may have even miscounted. Again, this is good - the filmmakers know exactly why one watches a Power Rangers movie.

At this point we get to see the big-screen versions of the Power Rangers suits. Here they are.

As you can see, they look a bit more metallic than the TV versions, but unlike the upcoming movie, which radically alters the original design, these suits keep it close to what we see on TV. They even duplicate the ridiculous whooshing sound every time one of them moves one of their arms, which is a small but awesome touch.

While these fights are going on, Ivan Ooze invades the Command Center, destroying it, and nearly killing Zordon in the process. Yes, Zordon is actually brought to the edge of death here. Therein lies the main thrust of the plot - the Rangers must travel across the universe to the planet of Phaedos, retrieve new powers capable of reviving Zordon, and use those powers to kill Ivan Ooze.

Now, besides being among the most epic plots ever conceived for a children's film, notice what the filmmakers did here. They created a plot in which their mentor almost fucking dies, but does it in such a way that doesn't seem dark or edgy. Zordon's death is simply treated as sad, and the Rangers react as if, as Kimberly mentions, they're losing a father. This is all we need - to introduce an element of cynicism into the equation would just ruin it. Instead, it drives the Rangers to do what seems like the impossible, and the rest of the movie is, in fact, them attempting their epic quest.

I don't know how much more I need to say about the plot - obviously, the Rangers make it to Phaedos, and succeed in their trial to get their new powers. One of the fights on Phaedos sees them pitted against reincarnated dinosaur bones - again, no logical reason for it to be there, but it makes it that much more awesome.

On Earth, Ivan Ooze brainwashes a bunch of the local parents to dig up and reassemble a pair of giant robots that will, of course, because this is Power Rangers, be used in the final Zord battle. After they're done constructing them is when he flippantly tells them to commit suicide by jumping off a cliff - of course, they're saved in the end, because I don't think anyone on planet earth would allow a theatrically released children's film to feature a scene of mass suicide.

The final battle, as I said, is between Ivan Ooze's two massive robots and the Rangers' new Ninja Zords. There is, unfortunately, an issue here, and it's because the filmmakers decided to use CG for all the robots in the movie. Remember, this was made in 1995, so if you're expecting it to look good, then no.

Yeah, it hasn't aged too gracefully, and I'm pretty sure that primitive CG is the reason why the robots move around so stiffly. It would have probably looked better if they had just stuck with physical models like the TV show did, but then, I suppose they wanted to show off their big budget, and in 1995 this was the way to do it. Maybe it worked back then, but 22 years later? Not so much.

I'm willing to forgive it, though. After all, the fight ends with the Rangers and a massive Ivan Ooze/Robot hybrid flying into space, with the Rangers using a fucking comet as a weapon to kill him. Yes, we've already been across the universe once, but going back into space one more time is the proper way to end the fight. And I couldn't be happier about that.

As we all expected, Ivan Ooze is killed and Zordon in restored. The movie ends with the entire city of Angel Grove in celebration, watching a massive fireworks show while Van Halen's Dreams plays in the background.

You wanna know another reason why this movie is great? It's the only thing on planet earth that can turn a Sammy Hagar-era Van Halen song into something positive. That's something I never in a billion years thought could ever happen.

So yes, this entry is becoming unwieldy in its length, and honestly there are probably a lot of things I could still add. But I don't want to bog everyone down - really, I just wanted to talk about why I love this movie. It's not a masterpiece, but it isn't attempting to be in any conceivable way. All it's trying to do is be entertaining, action packed, epic, and a little bit absurd. Or, to put it another way, all it's trying to do is be a Power Rangers movie. And it succeeds on every level.

Anime Roulette #6: Chrono Trigger

Logically, Role Playing Games should make for excellent anime adaptations. I mean, come on: an enormous quest to save the world, epic battles, gorgeous fantasy settings (or sci-fi, if you're like Star Ocean or Xenosaga), they certainly would appear to have all the necessary elements to make a great movie or TV Show. But alas, reality does not always follow logic - anime adaptations of RPGs may have a better track record than anime adaptations of fighting games (though that really isn't saying much), but not by a whole lot. We have some great things, like Persona 4, but overall the landscape is exceptionally bleak. The Xenosaga TV series is a goddamn mess. The Fire Emblem OVA sounds like it was written by a 7 year old. And Final Fantasy? Well shit, it has over 20 years of anime adaptations, and most of them are pretty fucking terrible!

Yes friends, that's supposed to be a chocobo.

Somewhere in this depressing bulk of RPG adaptations lies Chrono Trigger. If you've never heard of Chrono Trigger, you're seriously missing out - it's not only considered one of the greatest RPGs of all time, but is often brought up as a contender for one of the greatest video games ever made. It's a goddamn incredible tale of a boy who travels back and forth through time to not only fix the conflicts of various historical eras, but eventually save the world from a gigantic alien parasite (trust me, it's cooler than my description would suggest). I could easily spend an entire blog post describing how great this game is,  but for the sake of brevity, I'll just say: buy it, emulate it, do whatever you want, just find some way to play it, alright?

The game was an immediate success both in Japan and the US, so in 1996, just one year after its release, Production IG decided to make a Chrono Trigger anime. It had all the potential to be a blockbuster: Chrono Trigger itself already has all the elements of a classic fantasy tale, and Production IG was hot off the runaway success of the first Ghost in the Shell movie. So did it become a blockbuster? Oh my god, not even fucking close.

Unlike most of the other shows I've written about for Anime Roulette, this one is actually on YouTube, so by all means, before reading the rest of this entry, watch it for yourself:

So, let's get the obvious out of the way. Chrono Trigger probably took me about 30 hours to beat, and that includes the seven side quests at the end. This anime is, in total...16 minutes. Yeah, they're not even going to attempt to tell the entire story. But hey! That's alright! There are so many great portions of the game they could animate! The escape from Guardia Castle, the fall of Zeal, the siege of the Tyrano Lair, my god, I could go on and on! What they decided on in the end was...The Millennial Fair?

As I said in my Final Fantasy XV post, The Millennial Fair is the first area of the game, where you're introduced to the characters and get the opportunity to play some fun little mini games. Ultimately, it's a well constructed tutorial, and that's all it's trying to be. In the context of the game, it works, but really, it's the least Chrono Trigger aspect of Chrono Trigger, and so it's ironic that this is what the creators of a Chrono Trigger OVA decide to focus on.

But it's not just about the Millennial Fair. You see, two minutes in, the sun goes down, the humans go to sleep, and...the monsters come out and take over the fair. Yes, the entire OVA is going to focus on the goddamn wacky hijinks of a group of monsters at The Millennial Fair that goes on when the humans aren't around - basically, it's the plot of a shitty early 2000s Dreamworks animated film.

This is what Colonel Kurtz saw at the end of Apocalypse Now.

Honestly though, that's giving it a little too much credit. To say this movie has a plot is almost a flat out lie - things just kind of happen one after the other without much rhyme or reason. And none of it is entertaining. A group of monsters argue about a dance contest, because WACKY!!!

Another group of monsters has a drinking contest, again because WACKY! Though I must give it credit, that scene does have the closest thing this movie has to a funny joke - the little white monster pulls out an SNES controller and starts button mashing the A button in an attempt to get the other monster to win. It works because that's what you do in the game itself, so at least I know these guys have played the game. Though that begs the question - if they played the game, why the hell did they choose to turn it into this?

The last half of the movie focuses primarily on Gato, he has metal joints, beat him up and you win silver points. Though I should point out he's actually called Gonzalez here, because that was his original name in the Japanese release. Anyway, some of the monsters draw on him when he's turned off, then later he goes crazy and running around, and ends up setting a bunch of things on fire, because, can you guess why?

Arson is WACKY AS FUCK.

This is kind of how it all ends. After all the destruction, Gato passes out in the middle of the square. And then, in what's without question the most insulting scene in the entire film, the main characters from the game look out in him, ostensibly in confusion, though we can't actually see because we're shown them from the back. This is the only trace of any of Chrono Trigger's main characters, and they're on screen for 30 seconds and don't say one word.

I'm not going to mince words here: I fucking hated this movie. A 16 minute short film should not have made me as angry as I feel now, but somehow Chrono Trigger did it. It is actually impressive how many things they got wrong - the jokes were atrocious, the tone was insulting, the focus was nowhere close to where it should have been, the animation was ass - really, the only thing I can commend this movie on is it's music, and that's solely because they just took the cracks from the game and inserted them wholesale. Yasunori Mitsuda can do no wrong, but even his score wasn't enough to make this bearable.

This is a movie I can honestly recommend to nobody. Fans of the game are obviously going to feel insulted watching this - anyone who appreciates comedy is best served elsewhere - maybe, maybe if you've got a really young child, the kind of child who thinks Minions is the bestest movie ever, then maybe they'll like watching all the monsters scream things and run around. But if you have a kid like that, really, you owe it to them to expand their horizons - for the fuck's sake, show them My Neighbor Totoro if they haven't already seen it. For everyone else: STAY THE FUCK AWAY FROM THIS MOVIE. I can honestly say this is one of the worst things I have ever seen, and as someone who's seen Battlefield Earth multiple times - hell, as someone who does bad anime panels at multiple conventions every year, that's not an honor I throw around lightly.

Thoughts on The Last Guardian

There's an important lesson that anyone interested in art and entertainment needs to keep close to their hearts: beware of anything that has an abnormally long production time. If something's been in the work for, say, a decade or more, there's a natural tendency to build it up to build it up to such an unrealistic level that disappointment is inevitable. It also doesn't help that these things, for some reason, tend to be objectively disappointing across the board. The examples are endless, and span virtually all modern media. In movies, The Phantom Menace was anticipated for years and years, and look at how great that turned out. In music, Guns N' Roses promised us Chinese Democracy in the '90s, and when it finally came out in 2008, nobody wanted it, not even Best Buy bargain shoppers.

STOP GIVING AXL ROSE MONEY, FOR THE FUCK'S SAKE

In video games, the most obvious example is Duke Nukem Forever, a game that honestly deserves its own series of blog entries. But The Last Guardian certainly should be included among that crowd. Originally created by Team Ico in 2007, the game suffered delay after delay after delay, with many, including myself, thinking it was never going to be released at all. Well, imagine my surprise when, in 2015, we were finally given a release date, and in late 2016, the game came out for the PS4. After playing through a good portion of the game, the question must be: was this game worth the nearly ten year wait we as gamers were subjected to?

Like all of Team Ico's games, I can sum up the point in a few sentences. You're a young boy, and you wake up in a field next to a giant beast named Trico, which, I have to say, is probably the best part of the game. Trico's design is so fucking adorable.

I mean, come on - look at that little face. Don't you want a plush of this guy?

Anyway, I'm distracting myself. You and him are essentially set on exploring this ruined world, a world that's filled with colossal broken towers, demonic suits of armor, and titanic cliffs. Like Team Ico's other two games, the plot and characterization is minimal, with story progression often given through suggestion and, on occasion, brief flashbacks. What's important, instead, is atmosphere, and the intense focus, through the gameplay, of the relationship between you and Trico.

I opened this blog by asking whether this game was worth waiting almost a decade for. I now think that question is irrelevant - instead, we should be asking, was it worth paying $60 for? The answer to that question is much easier: no.

The Last Guardian is simply too short to justify that price - if played correctly, the game can be beaten in a matter of hours. This is a criticism I had of both Ico an Shadow of the Colossus, and such criticism is harder to accept, in 2017, than it was in the mid 2000s. When I play The Last Guardian, it feels, now, like a game that would be offered exclusively on the Playstation Network and sold for $15 or $20. Something like Journey, for instance. Such a price would, I think, be fair - you can be taken in by the astonishing setting, the powerful relationship between your character and Trico, and be done with it quickly.

As it stands, we're asked to pay the same price for this game as we are for, say, Final Fantasy XV, a game I'll bring up again since it seems to be a reoccuring theme of this blog. I've probably put in close to 50 hours in that game, and I still am not anywhere near close to finishing all that it can offer. I paid full price for that game, and I feel that price was justified for such a massive game. The Last Guardian has no justification.

This all sounds pretty negative, and I suppose it is, but honestly I really like the game as a whole. Trico is actually surprisingly responsive to commands, which I wasn't expecting for a computer AI character. The settings, as I've said, are gorgeous, and Team Ico stands second to none when it comes to creating mood in their games. There is an overwhelming sense of loneliness in their worlds - though there are, technically, other people, the games make you believe that you and your companion are the only living things left. What each game does with that feeling is different - Ico makes you feel like a protector, while Shadow gives you an intense feeling of sadness when you're done killing all those colossi. The Last Guardian, in purely tonal terms, is my personal favorite - the cooperation of the main character and Trico is the only the only guarantor of survival (and meaning, if I'm being honest) in this ruined world.

That feeling alone is worth playing the game, and so it's with sadness that I feel the need to recommend for gamers to wait until it reaches an appropriate price. Team Ico took nearly ten years to make this game, but in the process, they stopped paying attention to the evolution of the video game market. Thankfully, in the future, the game will drop in price, and you'll be able to buy it on the PSN for $20 like I've said. At that point, we'll no longer have to concern ourselves with these pedestrian economic issues, and the game's true merits will be what we remember.

PAPA SMURF'S GONNA TAKE UR WEED, MAN: Cartoon All-Stars To The Rescue

Though 1990 may have been the start of new decade, some of the most obnoxious trends in 1980s entertainment continued to be annoyingly omnipresent. For instance, hair metal not only stuck around, but was almost at a commercial high point, with even fourth or fifth tier bands like Warrant able to achieve Top 10 success. Somehow.

This is a real thing that exists. And we have no one to blame but ourselves.

Shifting away from music, a television trend that continued to exert its influence well into the early 90s was something called The Very Special Episode. This is something many of you no doubt have at least heard of - The Very Special Episode was, in brief, when a comedy show attempted to wrestle with some sort of serious or controversial topic, usually somehow involving teen sex or drug use. What show holds the honor of presenting the first Very Special Episode is up for debate, though my money goes to Diff'rent Strokes, with its infamous episode where Gary Coleman is molested by the owner of the bicycle shop. Yeah, that's a thing that happened.

From this point onward, The Very Special Episode became virtually unavoidable, with shows like The Facts of Life and Family Ties airing multiple VSEs throughout their history. For some shows, almost every episode was a VSE - I know there are a lot of you out there who love Full House to death, but you have to admit, that show was VSE overkill.

Now, I understand sitcoms have been dealing with heavy shit since long before Diff'rent Strokes aired - hell, All In The Family's entire reason for existing was trying to make sense out of the brave new world that was (and still is) post-1960s US Culture. But here's the thing: shows like All In The Family are primarily for adults, while any show with a Very Special Episode is "family friendly." There are a lot of young kids watching these shows - because of this, I think writers feel they have to talk down to the audience, to make the issue easy to digest. Here's a clip from Full House to demonstrate my point:

This provides no insight into the world of child abuse whatsoever - for the fuck sake, they actually used the "I walked into a doorknob" line unironically! Full House doesn't think the children in the audience can comprehend the serious reality of child abuse, and so reduces it to a collection of cliches and stock phrases we've heard a hundred times before. Ironically, this does exactly the opposite of what they're intending to do: by taking the complexity out of the issue, by treating it like a condescending stereotype, we actually understand it less than when we began watching!

This whole divergence on the Very Special Episode is, I think, essential with regards to what I'm going to be talking about today: Cartoon All-Stars To The Rescue.

Basically, this is a Very Special Episode raised to the tenth power. McDonald's (yes, the Big Mac guys) and Disney decided to address the issue of childhood drug abuse by producing a 30 minute short film in which cartoon characters from ten different popular franchises (remember, this was 1990, so popular meant The Smurfs and Looney Tunes and Garfield) come together to help out two human teenagers with their drug problem. Yes, it sounds so stupid, and so patronizing, but oh my god, was this show a big deal back in the day.

Just how big? Consider: when this movie first aired on April 21, 1990, not only did it air, simultaneously, on all four major networks, but also on most independent and cable channels as well!  George and Barbara Bush, of all people, took time away from running the country to introduce the damn thing! You know, I was only 11 days old when this thing aired, so I don't remember it at all, but I do remember when I was a bit more grown up, there was another time when President Bush introduced something that was aired simultaneously on every major TV station in the country. Oh, what was it, oh yeah, it was the 9/11 attacks.

Basically the same thing as Papa Smurf.

I'm not saying this to be insensitive - it's more that when the only thing I can compare your broadcast schedule to is the coverage of the most deadly terrorist attack in US history, then you sure as hell better have some justification for airing on that many networks at the same time. Does Cartoon All-Stars have that justification? Oh, I don't know, take a fucking wild guess.

So, the whole set-up of this show is that Corey, an innocent young girl, is sleeping in her bed one Saturday morning, when somebody reaches into her bedroom and snatches her piggy bank. Corey, being an innocent young girl, has posters, books, etc of basically every major cartoon character from the 1980s scattered around her room, and, witnessing the theft, they all come to life. This scene was a red flag for me for two reasons: first, though the movie's run time is just under 30 minutes, this scene lasted about five. Yes, this one scene lasts around 20% of the run time. Toy Story was able to pull off something similar in about a minute, and that movie was over three times as long. Secondly, one of the cartoons is Alf. You know, the sitcom alien that likes to eat cats. Yeah, that's how I knew this was going to be a thing of beauty.

After our Cartoon All-Stars (and Alf) come to life, they soon discover the criminal responsible for the piggy bank theft. Of course, it was her older brother Michael, a boy who looks to be about 15 going on 45.

What's wrong with his face!? Well, it turns out the answer to that question may have something to do with why he stole the money from his sister. Thanks to some Solid Snake-caliber stealth, our Cartoon All-Stars find (gasp) a hidden stash of marijuana hidden under his bed! But that's not all - Michael uses the money to buy more weed for him and his friends. They end up smoking the whole lot, which, of course, causes an anthropomorphic cloud of smoke to appear and start talking to Michael.

Almost as smokin' as Jim Carrey. Almost.

This guy, of course, is the proverbial devil on Michael's shoulder, who'll do everything in his power to keep him convinced that continuing to do drugs is the best idea ever. From here on out, the entire movie consists of a series of encounters between Michael and the Cartoon All-Stars, who tell him the dangers of drugs but are never quite able to convince him 100%, before he finally kicks the habit when his sister Corey knocks some sense into his punk ass.

Alright, let's start with the easiest target, and shockingly, it doesn't have anything to do with Alf. If anything in this video betrays its 1980s feel (despite it being made in 1990), its the fact that it takes 90% of its time to demonize marijuana, a drug that, as of 2017, is legal, whether recreationally or medicinally, in a good portion of the US. A drug that study after study confirms is a hell of a lot less dangerous than these Reefer Madness types lead us to believe it was. They even use, via Smoke, the old argument that marijuana is a gateway drug to harder shit, which, again, isn't as true as people once thought it was. I'll put it bluntly - this film is dated. Not as dated as Reefer Madness, but hell, it's not too far off.

So fine, marijuana isn't as big of a deal as we once thought. People can still, while not being addicted, take their hobby way too far to the point where it consumes their life - I get that, and I think this movie did too, because Michael is an asshole. He's mean to his sister, he commits petty theft, etc etc. How does these cartoon characters try to get him to see the error of his ways? Oh god, the best example has to come right after Michael and his friends are smoking - they hear a police siren and scatter, and Michael finds himself trapped in an alleyway, with a policeman walking slowly in his direction. After about 30 seconds, we're shown that it isn't actually a policeman, it's Bugs Bunny, who just happens to be wearing a policeman's hat and in possession of an authentic police siren.

The irony of this scene is astounding - they want to convince us of the danger and moral bankruptcy of taking drugs, and the one they conscript into convincing us is a cartoon rabbit who, for literally no reason whatsoever, was impersonating a police officer, something that I'm 98% sure is a felony in every state in the nation. Setting up the scene in this way makes it virtually impossible to claim any sort of moral high ground.

To add a swift kick in the balls to what's already been something that I'm pretty sure the 8th Amendment considers unconstitutional, when Bugs starts giving Michael his anti-drug spiel, it's honestly the most banal advice on the planet. Shit like, "what's important is inside you!" is said without a tinge of irony. The way I see it, there are two potential scenarios at play here. One: Michael is a recreational pot smoker, in which case everyone is blowing the entire situation way the fuck out of proportion. Two: Michael has some deep-seeded psychological issues that cause him to be consumed (note how I didn't say "addicted") by marijuana, in which case it's going to take a fuck of a lot more than Dr. Bugs Bunny MD, whose Mr. Rogers caliber pop-psychology convinces me he has nowhere near the necessary APA certification to be treating someone like that professionally.

That scene embodies every single problem with this show, and makes it perfectly clear that, despite its "star power" and cultural prestige, Cartoon All-Stars is really no different than any other terribly written, offensively condescending Very Special Episode. Aside from Michael being an asshole, we aren't shown or told why drugs are bad - they're just this thing that we're all supposed to know is bad and that's all we have to say on the matter, young man. Aside from a vague suggestion about wanting to fit in with the crowd, we aren't shown or told why people turn to drugs - even if that was given as a legitimate suggestion, it's too simple to be taken seriously. Nobody watching this is going to learn anything about drugs - they're just going to be given a message that exactly reinforces what society has been telling them for decades. This is propaganda, pure and simple, and I guess propaganda is socially acceptable when it comes in the form of an old blue man and a stuffed bear talking to kids.

And that's the final irony concerning this piece of shit film. The Cartoon All-Stars are, clearly, the centerpiece of this movie. But really, they have very little impact - Michael's final encounter with his sister does more to change his way of thinking than all of the preceding 30 minutes of encounters with fictional characters put together. Honestly, I think there's something important to be taken away from that: reconnecting with the ones you love, in times of crisis, is a more effective method of intervention than any sort of conversation with Bugs Bunny will ever be. But I don't think the movie understands this - I think that scene was included because they needed some quick way to wrap things up, and any sort of epiphany it provides must, as I've just done, be taken out of context, in contrast to how it was probably written and directed.

I can't tell you how successful this movie was, but I can tell you that very shortly after this aired, sitcoms like Seinfeld started taking over US airwaves, and soon enough the whole idea of the Very Special Episode became seen as an antiquated embarrassment. This can only be a good thing. I know kids are still using drugs, and, depending on the circumstances, that can be a serious problem. But you know what? If we want that to change, we can't rely on a feline-eating alien and a group of talking chipmunks to do all the heavy lifting for us.

Anime Roulette #5: The Laws of the Sun

One of the reasons why I love anime so much is because there is, seemingly, anime about everything. American animation is so dominated by a few select styles that we can often forget, or fail to assume, that animation can be used to tell literally any kind of story, whether it's an insane violence epic or a touching exploration of transgenderism. For the most part, this is positive - until we realize that the unbound freedom anime offers us can even be used to make ridiculous propaganda videos for Japanese cults. Which is, of course, what I'm going to be talking about this time.

The Laws of the Sun is, literally, a propaganda film made by a religious organization called, I shit you not, Happy Science. Founded in 1986, the movement believes its founder, Ryuho Okawa, is the reincarnation of a celestial being called El Cantare, who's apparently the true form of the Old Testament God. In the past, El Cantare incarnated himself as The Buddha - in his present form as Okawa, he is able to channel the spirits of such religious leaders as Jesus, Muhammad, and Confucius. As if that weren't enough, Okawa can apparently use his powers to speak to the spirit of Margaret Thatcher for political advice, because of course that's a thing he can do.

Bomb China - Reagan agrees with me.

Obviously, their beliefs are nuts, and it would take an entire entry in itself to completely unpack their theology. Thankfully, this movie makes it so that I don't have to - the plot is essentially a retelling of the Happy Science creation myths.

El Cantare, as it turns out, isn't the highest god in the Happy Science pantheon - the Primordial God, as he's called, first appeared 80 billion years ago, and he's described in this movie as a "13th dimensional cosmic spirit." Yes, 13th - this is the guy that's responsible for the creation of the universe, and as such, the first part of the movie consists largely of wonderfully animated sequences of cosmic activity.

Honestly, this movie deserves credit for its consistently high animation quality - though made by a fringe religious group, they somehow convinced Group TAC, the studio responsible for awesome shows like Touch and the Street Fighter Movie, to animate it. How in the hell they worked that out is beyond me - the upside is that when shit really starts going bananas (which doesn't take long at all), we're able to watch the insanity in beautifully animated form.

Like I said, the insanity begins very quickly - El Cantare, we're told, is a 9th Dimensional Cosmic Spirit that was originally born as El Miore, guardian spirit of the planet Venus.

I'm sure you guys remember this from high school history class, but Venus, we're told, was originally the home to a hyper-advanced civilization that makes the Galactic Republic from Star Wars look like a motherfucking collection of tribal huts. I mean, look at how goddamn beautiful this is!

But TJ, you say, the planet Venus is completely uninhabitable. Don't worry, the movie itself is quick to point this out - at a certain point, El Miore and the other Cosmic Spirits realize that perhaps building a civilization on a planet comprised of dangerous volcanoes maybe isn't the best idea. It's alright! They'll just transport the population of Venus to this new planet called Earth - El Miore will continue to be their guardian spirit, this time under the name El Cantare, while a few other spirits will come in to guide the new Earth civilization in the right direction, one of those spirits, of course, being Jesus Christ.

What, you thought I was joking?

All of this literally takes place in the first 15 minutes of the film. And even though I've barely scratched the surface, I think you can clearly see what makes this movie so baffling. Every religious system, whether it be Christianity or Ancient Greek polytheism, is founded on a group of stories - for many of these systems, these stories are so well told, so fundamentally archetypal, that even those who don't believe can get something out of them. The stories in The Laws of the Sun don't feel mythic, archetypal, or well told in the slightest. They want to be told as sincere history, yet the things we see are so fucking ridiculous that nobody in their right mind will take them as history. A super civilization on Venus is the least of our problems here - are we supposed to believe that a 13th and 9th Dimensional Cosmic Spirit didn't have the foresight to understand that building a human civilization on a toxic/volcanic planet may not be the best idea? These are supposed to be their supreme beings, and they're doing stupid shit like this! They wanted it both ways - to have a crazy Venusian civilization and to have the atmosphere of the planet be recognizable - but it just doesn't fucking work. It's dumb, no way around it.

You know what else is dumb? What happens afterwards. So all the Venusians are living on Earth now, but the civilization is selfish and corrupt, even though El Cantare and Space Jesus are supposed to be tag-teaming to get this shit done. Their corruption peaks when they brutally kill all the dinosaurs, which happens, I swear to El Cantare, by having all the humans ride around on hoverboards and shoot them with lazer beams.

Thankfully, the spirits have thousands and thousands of years to get this human civilization thing right. The rest of the movie is basically the progression of human life on Earth from our dinosaur-lazering low point to where we are now. Of course, because Happy Science has such a firm grasp of history, that progression may look a bit different to what we've been told in the past. We start with Satan, who is, of course, an corrupt spirit originally from the Large Magellanic Cloud.

We move forward through some of the great empires of the world - the most important, of course, being those based on the lost continents of Mu and Atlantis. These empires were lead by El Cantare himself, who took the human forms of wise men called La Mu and Thoth. Also, quick note - the sign of any great empire is pyramid power.

From there, we spend a bit of time in the Incas, in Greece, and finally in India, where El Cantare took on the form of Buddha. This was, we're told, his final and most important human form until his present incarnation in Ryuho Okawa - as such, a good portion of the movie focuses on Buddha's story. Unfortunately, this was probably the most boring portion of the movie as well - honestly, if I want to see the story of Buddha done right, Osamu Tezuka beat you to it decades ago, Happy Science.

Note: Osamu Tezuka is the only person on the planet who can wear a beret and not instantly become an insufferable douche, because Osamu Tezuka is the motherfucking God of Manga and he can do what he wants. Alright? Good.

As you can see, I've basically given up on talking about this movie in any sort of sane way. It's impossible to review this like an actual movie, because the things we're meant to take seriously are so far beyond what is acceptable for most people that there's no point in even trying. When faced with something this absurd, all we can do is point out that it exists, and there are thousands, if not millions, of people who take it seriously. That, and try your best to be entertained.

I'll be honest - if animation, as an art form, succeeds or fails based on how entertaining it is, then this is one of the most successful pieces of animation I've ever seen. You literally have no fucking clue what's coming next, and when it hits you that they're going to be spending five minutes blasting dinosaurs with lazers, you laugh like a madman. This would be such a great thing to watch in a group of your intoxicated friends - seriously, anyone watching this needs to buy like three bottles of whiskey and just watch this thing straight though. If you aren't entertained, I'll give you a dollar. Seriously.

One last thing before I stop - though this movie never got an official release in the US, Happy Science did produce an English dub of it. This is noteworthy for two reasons: it actually isn't terrible, and, though I have no way to confirm this, I'm like 95% sure that El Cantare is voiced by Crispin Freeman. I'm dead fucking serious - the same guy who voiced Alucard from Hellsing seems to be the voice of El Cantare. Somebody watch this clip from Hellsing Ultimate and then watch The Laws of the Sun, and tell me if I'm right or if I'm just delusional.

Is this not the same guy? I want to believe it is, if for no other reason than for its poetic beauty. If Morgan Freeman has become the unofficial voice of God among American actors, then it's perfectly fitting that Crispin Freeman is the unofficial voice of God among American voice actors.  And hell, if the voice of El Cantare really is Crispin Freeman's voice, then maybe the theology of Happy Science isn't as awful as I was lead to believe.