Saturday Night At The Movies
Facebookopalypse Now
By Dennis Hartley
Soothing image #473: Summer Wars
Don’t be misled by the cartoonish title of Mamoru Hosoda’s Summer Wars-this could be the Gone with the Wind
The film opens with echoes of Weird Science
Kenji is hit with an even bigger surprise when Natsuki introduces him to her family as her “fiancée”. Flustered at first, Kenji decides (correctly) that he should probably play along. After apologizing for springing this on him, Naksuki begs Kenji to go along with the ruse for the duration of their visit; she just wants to avoid getting hounded by nosy relatives on the subject of matrimony. This actually gives the shy and socially awkward Kenji an instant entre with the noisy, eccentric but loving clan. He has some consternation when Natsuki’s “first crush” suddenly shows up-her brooding, James Dean-ish uncle (J. Michael Tatum), who is the long-estranged black sheep of the family.
Late one evening, Kenji receives a cryptic text message, challenging him to crack a super-complex equation (which, as we know, is like catnip to a math nerd). After pulling an all-nighter, he solves it. Unfortunately, he soon discovers that he has been duped; by solving the math problem, he has unwittingly enabled a malicious AI program to hack into the Oz network-and sees his photo plastered all over the TV news as a wanted cyber-criminal (much to his newly adopted family’s chagrin). As the virus begins to methodically assimilate the avatars belonging to hundreds of millions of users, it exponentially gains more control over the grid, wreaking increasingly insidious infrastructural havoc worldwide as its power grows. Soon the stakes become even higher-and in true anime tradition, the mantle of saving the earth falls on upon the diminutive shoulders of our geeky hero and his friends (with unexpected help from grandma, who proves that in times of crisis, it’s the ol’ skool social networking skills that really count).
Although a number of the narrative devices in Satoko Ohuder’s screenplay will feel somewhat familiar to anime fans (particularly when it comes to the more bombastic “cyber-punk” elements of the story), it’s the humanistic touches and subtle social observations (quite reminiscent of the films by the great Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu) that make this such a worthwhile and satisfying entertainment. Director Hosoda began his career in the genre back in the early 90s, working at Japan’s highly respected Toei Animation studio as an animator. This is only the second feature-length anime he has helmed; his first was the outstanding 2007 fantasy-adventure, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time
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