Wednesday, January 25, 2012

SUMMER WARS (2009)

From the director of THE GIRL WHO LEAPT THROUGH TIME comes the impressively animated but ridiculously plotted story of an high school math genius, Kenji, who is invited by a very cute classmate, Natsuki, to visit her family's estate for her grandmother's 90th birthday celebration and ends up nearly destroying the world. D'oh!

Things go well enough at the beginning, until he receives an mysterious email with a math problem. He replies with the answer. Turns out the email was from an "hacker artificial intelligence" named Love Machine and the answer was the code protecting a massive virtual reality world called OZ. OZ isn't just some bullshit social networking site like Facebook, but an worldwide infrastructure that controls everything from red-light signals to satellites!

That would spell Bad News Bears for most people, but luckily Natsuki's family are descendents from a samurai warriors so they have a real fighting spirit...also Natsuki's uncle is the one who original created Love Machine for the U.S. Army!!!!!!! Talk about a small world. But that's only the beginning of it. Assembled within this small family gathering is the greatest gamer on OZ; the owner of a specialty computer business who sets up a supercomputer in the living room (!!!); a military guy who gets a large radar for them; a rich guy who parks a huge yacht in the koi pond to power the supercomputer plus numerous emergency workers like paramedics and pigs. It's insane...especially when Love Machine points a falling satellite towards a nearby nuclear power plant and Kenji hacks into the satellite's GPS to redirect it while virtually fighting Love Machine in a fist fight!

Normally a story that fantastically ridiculous (and lazy) would turn me completely off, but the animation was impressive enough that I watched the entire thing and rather enjoyed it. I'll never ever watch it again, but it was a nice way to burn a few hours. Too bad the story wasn't better.