It’s only been a few months since the last update to Friday the 13th: The Game, but in that short space of time, the combined teams over at Gun Media and IIIFonic have been furiously making announcements, pledging new features at an absolutely manic rate.
7. At the Mountains of Madness
It’s time to take a trip into the unknown… yes, the movie industry! It’s another episode where we find a large, mostly unmemorable, ship crew slowly picked off one by one by a mysterious entity. Join us for discussions on the meaning of life, religion, and mutated penguins.
At the Mountains of Madness is adapted from the 1931 tale by H.P. Lovecraft of the same name. The 2010 script is a passion project of Guillermo Del Toro, written by him and Matthew Robins.
Audio mixing by Jack
Foley and soundscapes found through Freesound.
Art by Ivan Laliashvili
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Review | Gehenna: Where Death Live
Gehenna: Where Death Lives , 2018.
Directed by Hiroshi Katagiri.
Starring Doug Jones, Lance Henriksen, Patrick Gorman, Simon Phillips, Sean Sprawling, and Eva Swan.
SYNOPSIS:
A scouting party are exploring the picturesque island of Saipan, with the intention of tracking down the ideal place for a new resort. These efforts are exacerbated somewhat by the incensed locals, who take objection to how the group are disrespectfully traipsing all over the island’s cultural heritage. In spite of this resistance, the team eventually discovers the perfect spot: remote; tranquil and situated right next to a gorgeous beach.
They are about to sign-off on the idyllic location, when they inadvertently stumble across a derelict WW2 Bunker. Theorising that this underground complex (a remnant of the former Japanese occupation) might cause some structural problems for the coming resort, the gang foolishly opt to investigate further. As you would expect, paranormal shenanigans ensue.
Gehenna: Where Death Lives doesn’t have much going for it, but it does boast one of the most fitting taglines in cinema history: ‘’Some fates are much worse than death’… Indeed.
For instance you could:
1) Awaken underground, unable to see or breathe, prematurely entombed within a small wooden coffin.
2) Contract a debilitating wasting disease and slowly wither away as your loved ones watch-on in bewildered horror.
3) Be condemned to a lifetime of gruelling labour, at the mercy of an illegitimate dictator who threatens to punish your family for any perceived slack. Every day you come home weary, beaten and afraid. Afraid that, no matter what you do, no matter how hard you try to save them, your children will inevitably succumb to the same miserable destiny.
4) Suffer from the infamous ‘’locked in syndrome’’, with a looping series of infomercials playing on the TV in front of you.
5) Work as a Sonderkommando in a Nazi Death camp, an occupation so harrowing that you sometimes envy the very bodies that you cart off to the furnace.
6) Watch Gehenna: Where Death Lives.
Should you find yourself in the latter scenario, then there are very few people in this world who will be able to understand your pain. So please, exercise some viewerly discretion and heed my warning: stay well away from Gehenna: Where Death Lives.
If you still insist on watching it, then I implore you to keep reading. At least that way you will be fully prepared for the galling tedium that’s to come…
Before going any further, I want to stress that this movie is not funny bad, or even fascinatingly inept. It’s just hard work. So if you decide to give it a shot, then don’t blame me if you have a thoroughly miserable time. Because this is nothing but turgid, uneventful claptrap; completely devoid of scares and entirely lacking in narrative coherence or basic entertainment value.
Like me, you may have been lured in by the film’s promise of recognisable character actors, like Doug Jones or Lance Henriksen. If that’s the case, then you will be pissed to discover that their combined screen time is approximately 180 seconds, with one them- quite literally – phoning in their performance from behind a desk. To be crystal clear, this film is not the Doug Jones vehicle that the poster is selling you. It doesn’t remotely hinge on one of his signature creepy characters, he just happens to be in it for a solitary scene and then a couple of insert shots thereafter. Still, apparently that’s enough to hang an entire marketing campaign on. Hmmm…
Your justified sense of rage will doubtlessly swell further, when it turns out that the actual leads of this rotting garbage pile are a bunch of clueless amateurs, who deliver their lines so awkwardly that you’ll swear they’ve never had to use vowels before.
To make matters worse, the filmmakers presumably thought that lights were only for high-falutin Oscar movies, and so elected to abandon them altogether. It certainly feels that way, with some sequences being so needlessly dark that they might as well be in a radio play for all the difference it would make. As a result, the majority of your viewing experience will be spent hopelessly squinting, trying to discern what the hell is happening on screen. Rest assured, it’s a waste of effort. Just save your eyesight for something that actually deserves it.
Oh, and you will also be subjected to relentless attempts at ‘’psychological horror’’, courtesy of a supernatural curse that only makes sense because every character in the film has unaccountably suffered a recent bereavement. It’s thoroughly unclear what would actually happen them otherwise. I suppose the curse would just skip them out?
It’s around this point that you will start to notice that the movie is not only intolerably generic and dreadfully acted, but also oppressively stupid. This notion will be later substantiated when a character wanders into a dimly lit room and posits that it looks too similar to all of the others. Upon making this observation, he inexplicably reasons that he must be stuck in some kind of temporal loop.
He says this, despite the fact that bunkers aren’t exactly known for having varied interior designs. In fact, it never once occurs to him that maybe the reason the rooms all look the same, is because they’re all dark, grey and empty. Instead of thinking in this way (you know, like a rational human being) he just infers that the very fabric of reality is deteriorating around him! Granted, he is later proven right, but it still doesn’t change the fact that this was his first fucking assumption!
To be fair, characters will come to similarly groundless conclusions throughout the movie, but after a while you’ll stop caring. You’re already long past trying to make sense of this nonsense. You just want it over with. So whenever someone makes an out-of-nowhere remark, or formulates some kind of bizarre and unmotivated plan, you’ll just roll your eyes and mutter ‘’Fine. Whatever it takes to get to the goddamn ending!’’
Speaking of which, as we approach that long-overdue climax (which involves a twist so heavily telegraphed, that Mr. Magoo could see it coming), you’ll begin to feel a deep-seated anger. A hateful sensation. One that is festering somewhere deep within your very being. If you’re wondering why you’re feeling this way, it won’t be thanks to an opportune organ failure (which would be a sweet mercy), but because you’ve just realized that nothing in this movie is of any consequence whatsoever.
Indeed, until the last couple of scenes, it’s all just people aimlessly wandering around in the dark. Evidently, this is all part of a calculated effort to stretch the runtime out to an arbitrary 100 minutes, when 80 would have clearly sufficed. Heck, even that’s being generous. There’s not enough material here to justify a 15 minute short, never mind a full-length feature!
And then as the credits begin to roll, it finally hits you. The eureka moment! At long last, you understand. Understand why this has all been so stilted and arduous. How could you have not seen it before? Gehenna: Where Death Lives is not a film in the conventional sense! It is not designed to entertain, tell a compelling story or transport its audience into another word. It has much loftier ambitions than that.
This isn’t a movie, it’s a statement! And that quote on the poster – it isn’t a promotional tagline. It’s a lesson. A cruel, painful lesson, one that you have gradually come to appreciate. You see it now too, don’t you? There are some fates worse than death.
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Review | Deadpool 2
Deadpool returns with… well it’s more Deadpool.
A transcript of this review will be up soon…ish.
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Review | Mary and the Witches Flower (メアリと魔女の花)
Mary leans on the Ghibli tradition moreso that Ponoc state, but without the sheer charm and joy that made those films so loved to begin with.
Read our interview with the director and producer here: http://bit.ly/2FVxV61
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Transcript
Hi and welcome back to Reel Opinions.
Before I get to the proper review I just wanted to say that there is an interview with the director and the producer of Mary and the Witches Flower up on our website that will be linked in the description. There’s only a few questions just because we had limited time and there was translation back and forth. But yeah, give it a read if you’re interested in more.
Mary the Witch’s Flower is the first film by Studio Ponoc; meaning “midnight” or “a brand new day” as a majority are staff that have left Studio Ghibli to start their own company. Yonebayashi, the director, he originally did ‘When Marnie Was There’ and ‘The Secret Life of Arietty’, and basically when Studio Ghibli started shutting now and it’s masters announced they were no longer producing feature films, its younger staff thought: “Well… We still want to do stuff. We’d like to have jobs” and so they have set off on their own ways.
There is a quote from the original book that they cited a lot in a lot of the interview materials where Mary says at one point: “I want to open this door but I want to open it without using magic no matter how long that takes” and that is kind of how they’ve cited their mindset going into this film. They wanted a character that liked magic, but then realized at the end of it that they no longer needed magic to be who they were. That is the context that they’ve seen for moving on from the magic of Studio Ghibli.
I understand that concept, however I think that they don’t push far enough with this film to be completely separate from the past.
I also think there’s something with that statement where you say “We don’t want magic” – as it’s disregarding that that is the aspect most people like about Studio Ghibli? They like that it’s got this magical element to it, this fantasy, this wonder, and saying we want to leave the magic of Studio Ghibili behind — I know that they’re highlighting its reputation moreso than the actual style of the films, because this is very much a continuation of that. But it’s a touchstone that I think highlights a few of the flaws going into the final product.
Mary and the Witch’s Flower is based on the English novel The Little Broomstick. Mary has moved to live with her elderly aunt in the countryside and it’s summer so she’s just waiting to start school in this new area. So she’s left in the house with just elderly people and nothing to really do and so she’s very bored and she slowly starts exploring the nearby countryside. While doing that she follows some cats finds the magical witch’s flower and a broomstick. By crushing one of the flower’s berries she gains magical powers for those 24 hours and the broom sets off and takes her away to Endor College where she finds a magical headmistress and plots happens, as it tends to do sometimes.
As films go it’s not particularly flawed in any way, it’s just missing that magic that they wanted to kind of step away from. Mary feels like a compilation of all the kind of stubborn Ghibili girls rolled into one, but with nothing in particular defining her. It’s also a very similar plot of being whisked away to a magical building run by a kind of creepy crony old woman who uses magic to control the girl at several times and it ultimately wraps into a story of Technology versus nature. So to say this is a film that is entirely branching out from what’s happened before would be… untruthful.
They have also said in all the promotional materials that they didn’t deliberately go out to try and make a film that would be popular and make money – they wanted to make something that they wanted to make; and again I think, is that really true? Because, granted, the director’s previous two books that he’s adapted into films are English fantasy novels by female writers around the same era, So that’s definitely in his MO, but the past two films were definitely smaller in scale and a lot more focused on human drama and emotions. Whereas this is on a much larger scale and just seems to skim over a lot of the human element of the film.
As you could probably see in the trailer obviously the animation is just top-notch all the way through. I think they’ve put a majority of the kind of flourishes in the trailer so you’ve probably already seen it on this video but there are some really amazingly animated sections.
I don’t know why I’ve left off this review so long because I saw it a while ago and when I think back to it I just think that there wasn’t that much to remember about it. Like I said the characters were kind of cut-out, the plot was… I wouldn’t venture to say predictable but it wasn’t particularly imaginative and the moments where the film was being imaginative it seemed to really brush over to get back to a plot that I wasn’t that interested in. In all of the interviews they mentioned how passionate they were about this project and I’d watched the behind-the-scenes documentary on the amount of work that they did put into it and the amount of late nights – but watching the final film you don’t feel that. You don’t feel the passion.
You don’t feel like this is a story that he really wants to tell. It feels like the story that the studio wants to tell to get a really good first start and I can understand that because starting a studio, especially a high quality animation feature film studio, is just– it’s a very very risky move. It just is. I’m not saying that they don’t love animation, obviously they love animation that’s why they are wanting to make this, but they need to set a good foundation for that company and I completely understand that but I just think that it means that whatever Ponoc come out with next potentially, or maybe the film after that, if they continue to be successful I just think that this will be looked back on as the safe foundation from which they tried to build something new.
I can’t hate the film for that. But it doesn’t mean I have to love it or particularly like it. I don’t think there was much to watch back on. I think that if you maybe have a kid, they might enjoy it. Just a kid that loves fantasy in particular But for adults– like adults can re-watch a lot of the classic Ghibili films and still feel that wonder of it and the fun. Personally I just don’t think there was enough of that here to really get me excited about it.
23. The Reset Button
Jack has hay fever. Harrison has a squeaky chair. We’re back to our usual audio gold.
The guys discuss the end of Infinity War and the storytelling behind it.
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Reel Opinions is a UK based film review group that covers just about anything. From reviews of terrible movies to interviews with casts and directors Reel Opinions covers everything we can be bothered to make.
Interview | Hiromasa Yonebayashi and Yoshiaki Nishimura (Director and Producer of Mary and The Witches Flower)
When Studio Ghibli announced it was closing production of feature films in 2014 many saw it as the end of an era, even if they did take back that statement a few years later. However, director Hiromasa Yonebayashi (The Secret World of Arriety, When Marnie was There) and producer Yoshiaki Nishimura (The Tale of Princess Kaguya, When Marnie Was There) instead saw it as a beginning of a new one.
Thus Studio Ponoc was born, a Serbo-Croatian word, roughly translating to “midnight” to signify “the beginning of a new day.”
Studio Ponoc’s goal was to continue in the footsteps of their teachers, taking with them a large group of Ghibli regulars, whilst also braving the new ever-changing world of the modern anime industry.
Their first feature release, Mary and the Witches’ Flower, finally releases in UK cinemas 4th May, so we sat down with the creative pair to discuss the creation, production, and future of the fantasy adventure and their newly founded studio.
How did you find the process adapting the book to the script?
Our previous work Marnie was a very quiet piece exploring a girl’s internal journey and this time we wanted to make something very action packed which had a lot of. We were looking for books and read many many original texts and that’s when we encountered [The Little Broomstick]. The book itself is very very interesting, it’s full of fun with a lot of speed and it makes you really get excited.
Upon making the film we wanted to add another transformation scene which was the animals which altered to other beings. Mary had issues with herself but through her adventure she tries to use her strength and power to help her friends, which leads her to manifest herself into another being. That’s her vertical pull. Her horizontal pull is Mrs Mumblechook and Dr Dee as they’re trying to alter other people and that is another gigantic theme.
Yonebayashi-San, you’ve said that the essential theme of the film is transformation, and while some grander animated moments such as the animals escaping are incredibly difficult to create you put much more effort into the scenes where Mary loses her power and has to change herself. What is the difficulty you find in expressing internal transformation versus external transformation?
Initially Mary has an inferiority complex about her ginger red hair and she was so unhappy that she would curse herself in the mirror – but eventually through her adventure they don’t matter to her. Initially she was thinking only of herself but eventually she discovered that she was able to sacrifice herself to save other people. That was the theme when I was designing these aspects.
Also there is a symbol on Marys palm that indicates when she is granted power, enormous power. But when she really needed the power the most she was unable to use it, she would just see a little scar on her palm. Nevertheless, she would turn her palm into a fist and proceed to go forward. We wanted to portray her determination. That even when she loses the magical power she is determined to go ahead. We thought that this was important and would resonated with a lot of audiences.
So what lessons are you taking from Mary and the Witches Flower, in both production and directing, into your next release Ponoc Short Films Theatre?
We employed lots of hand drawn animators for Mary and we are confident that we fully employed their strength and power for the hand drawn animation. With the short films we are trying to employ lots of hand drawn animation and lots of CG animation as well, and it is our challenge to mix these two medias. Hand drawn animation and computer graphics.
Mary and the Witches Flower comes to UK cinemas 4th May.
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Review | A Quiet Place
While The Quiet Place manages to captivate with it’s intriguing concept, it ultimately comes across as slightly toothless.
Transcript available soon
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Review | Avengers: Infinity War (Spoiler free!)
Does the biggest film of the year live up to the hype?
Transcript below
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Transcript
Hi and welcome back to Reel Opinions. It’s a big one. It’s Avengers Infinity War which comes out I suppose 36 hours from when this comes out I think, and it’s good. It’s genuinely really good. It already says in the title of the video but just to clarify, definitely no spoilers are here. Not even vaguely spoiler stuff, I just want to keep focusing on… not necessarily vague points but nonspecific.
I’m going to be splitting up this review kind of into two parts. One focusing on the experience of the film and the other being the film itself which will make sense when I get onto it. If you were just a big Marvel fan and you’re going through the reviews on YouTube trying to find if you should believe the hype or not then I would say, one, listen just to the first half of this video, and two, yes I would say so. Which is rare for me because I don’t think I’ve said that for a Marvel film for a long time. Possibly not since the first Avengers.
The reason I’m going to be breaking up the review into two parts is that as a film I think it’s great but has a few flaws but as like a movie
cinematic event I think that it is the most effective it’s being in a long long time and I think that even for myself, not a super fan of the series, I found myself honestly captivated and enthralled as to what was going to come next. Even staying away from fan theories you hear the fan theories and I think one very important point to make is that it surprised me which is not something a Marvel film has done in a long time. It genuinely surprised me, there were moments where I couldn’t believe that they made those choices. Perhaps more because I kind of view it so much as a (in context) as a very safe series so maybe that led into me being much more surprised. But I think that just leads into my ongoing point that I think
fans are definitely going to get exactly what they were hoping for with this film. I really enjoyed it.
The comedy is an improvement still on civil war and becomes much more hit than miss it is still hit and miss for me but much more hit this time. All of the matchups I think with characters meeting each other for the first time, I think that they play off each other very well in almost every single scene – and coming into that the creative way which the Russos dealt with the fight choreography in Civil War definitely continues with
this. Constantly trying to find new ways to just make these superheroes combine and find new interesting ways to try and make their powers fun to watch. I’m just so surprised that I think that they did manage to live up to the expectations of everything that’s been set up to this
film. I think there could be some controversial decisions that maybe some
fans don’t enjoy but I don’t think any fan could say that they didn’t deliver on the premise of this film. As a cinema experience I would say that it was the one of the most enjoyable I’ve had in a long time, genuinely, and again coming not as a complete super fan of the series.
Now is the part of the video where I’ll jump into some of the flaws that I found with it – so if you just wanted to hear the full positive stuff maybe tune out now. I’m not ripping into it or anything just that it’s small aspects where I wasn’t necessarily disappointed but I thought it could be improved upon and certain story beats that I think could be if anything just cut or changed. Again with being vague and spoiler free.
Firstly is the cinematography which, considering the amount that they poured into this film does not I think look as impressive as they hoped and I find that the ways in which the Russos put the camera I find actually takes away sometimes from what’s happening on screen. I don’t think that they portray action in the best way that they possibly could. However, I will say that every time they have a creative idea involving shots then that’s pulled off very well, surprisingly, so it’s a weird mixture where I think when the moments where it counts I think they pull off some really great visual moments, but in a lot of the hand-to-hand combat and less important moments in this film I think that the camerawork feels like sloppy and almost unclear at points. Not to a point where it’s completely detrimental to the film, but parts where I just thought it didn’t feel like it was tightly made. Maybe they are going for slightly more off-the-cuff aspect to it, to try and give a kind of more realistic feel to everything, but I think they just kind of came off as – when you’re doing it in such a massive CGI world for a lot of the film it doesn’t come off that way, it comes off as kind of easy camerawork and I think it shows off a lot of how they are directors that have come from TV.
Another middling point is that sometimes I think some of the initial interactions between the characters I think happened very quickly
just because want to get this show on the road. This doesn’t feel like a long film but this is a long film they have a lot to get through and so I can understand that sometimes they need to rush through some introductions but I think like, for instance, some of the characters meeting aliens for the first time that seemed to be very brushed under the rug and just kind of “Let’s go. Keep up the pace. We got to keep going.” From the moment the film starts it never really stops going the whole film and I find it admirable but yeah I just think there were certain parts that were brushed
under the rug a bit too much to get on with the action. There’s only one newly established character in this film which is Peter Dinklage and I thought his character was stupid. I didn’t take it seriously the whole time he was on screen and I know you could say that this was a film where you’re not meant to take everything completely seriously but it was just a silly character.
I’m genuinely amazed for some of the story points that they went with in the end. Oh, and the story points thing that I wanted to touch on is just that I briefly said about fan theories earlier and I think that that has kind of come into play into the script. I’ve talked a lot in recent reviews about how the idea that fans reactions to things, because of internet culture, I think media is becoming a lot more reactionary to fans responses for things and I think certain scenes in this play into that a tiny bit. Not so necessarily much in a fanservice way but just in a way that
it’s clearly playing off fans expectations and again for those scenes
I think that they could have been played differently or to be honest scrapped in order of more character building moments as opposed to setting up more questions just for the sake of more questions.
Again, I’m trying to stay vague but if someone watches the film and then comes back to this review I think that they might pretty easily put what scenes I’m trying to explain. It was genuinely impressive film, a really fun experience in the cinema, and while I don’t think it will be like my favourite film of the year or anything like that I think that this goes to show it’s just if anything it proves it as a big experiment that I think has paid off and I think that is ultimately going to cement it in a lot of fans hearts as like a true favorite series now.
Review | My Hero Academia (僕のヒーローアカデミア)
With season three now starting Jack takes a look at the series with enough charm to counter superhero-fatigue, My Hero Academia.
Transcript below
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Transcript
Hi and welcome back to Reel Opinions! So it’s been a while since I covered any anime stuff and that’s because I kind of just got burnt out on trying to keep up to date with all the seasonal stuff and trying to put out reviews for the channel, and I think it just led to me being really sick of all the mediocrity of all the stuff that comes out season upon season.
So I’m doing this review for three reasons really:
- Because it’s something I’ve already watched
- Because it’s relevant again and
- Because this is a show that kind of just gets me excited to watch stuff again
and I’m hoping if I talk about it a bit then it’s gonna make me more enthusiastic in myself to go and watch more stuff and start bringing reviews back onto the channel again, because they always tend to do much better than anything else we cover.
The show that I’m covering is My Hero Academia or Boku no Hero Academia or however much japanese you want to put in it to feel good about yourself. I’m covering season two, but really I’m just covering the whole show up until this point as season three just started two weeks ago.
If you don’t know anything about it the series takes place in a world where 80% of the population have developed quirks, which are essentially
just like X-Men mutant powers, and so because of this, they have naturally developed superheroes into society. They are not vigilantes in that they are accepted by society but also they work independently. They have their own agencies and they are paid by the government depending on how many people they save or how much stuff they protect, etc, etc. So it’s a very optimistic system and that’s kind of the groundwork for the rest of the series as it’s a very upbeat and optimistic look at superheroes and superheroes in society.
The story follows Deku who is a middle school kid who is born without a quirk,he’s one of the 20%, and because of this he’s kind of been the underdog his whole life, kind of picked upon and weak, he idolizes the best hero of them all, All Might, who is effectively the Superman of this world – nothing can touch him. Deku aspires to be a hero one day despite not having any powers. If he sees someone in trouble he will jump into the fray and one of these situations leads to him eventually meeting All Might. This isn’t a spoiler by the way, this is just setting up for the entire show. All Might reveals to him that his power is the only power in the world that can be passed on from person to person, so All Might passes on his power to him. Deku, now filled with this unimaginable power, has now got the chance to try out for Hero Academy, which is the superhero training high school.
The best praise that I can give this show is that it’s a very good Saturday morning cartoon. It doesn’t do anything particularly, completely different. It doesn’t go completely wild, but it does everything that has been done before very well… and with enough of a twist they just makes it that much different. For instance, Deku has essentially the most generic superhero power of all, in fact maybe in the whole show, which is just super strength – but the way they put the twist on it is that because he has not had powers ever in his life, and this power is more than he can possibly control using, just 1% of the power is enough to break his bones and leave him permanently damaged. So it’s not a case of, flick the switch, now he’s the most powerful character. It’s about him slowly learning to adapt this power to his body and slowly learning to use it bit by bit and using different aspects of it. Like applying the strength to different parts of his body. Because of that it means
that he still gets a progression despite the fact that you know he has the strongest superpower and it’s not only that he is being beaten down by other people around him when he gets into fights but also that he’s beating himself down in order to progress himself and so I think that he becomes quite compelling despite the fact that he can kind of fall into protagonist problems at times, which is just because he’s the central focus of the series he doesn’t tend to have as much characterizations as those on the fringes.
Another example of a power that’s done slightly differently is that his school antagonist, his best friend turned bully, Bakugo, he has fire
powers. Again, very generic thing, but it’s not completely as his sweat is kind of like nitroglycerin, so he controls explosions. When I say powers I don’t mean– you’ve probably already seen in the clips that I’m showing, but it physically changes them as well. Even for a kid show it’s not afraid to go into some of the weirder things like there is the person that has the ability to move any of their body parts to another part of their body. Which is just… freakishly fascinating. The idea that he can move his eyes to his palms to look around corners or move his ear to his foot to listen out for footsteps. There’s someone that has headphone jacks for ears, and people that are born with mechanical parts embedded into them, like exhausts into their legs. It’s making them physically different, which makes it much more entertaining to watch.
I’ve kind of talked about the design of the characters but I will also say that all of the characters themselves are admittedly trope-y, but with just enough earnestness put into them that you grow to enjoy them. It’s because of these characters that I think that it just pushes the enjoyment to another level when it comes to the fights, which are by far the best bit of the show.
Season one, I watched it and I honestly was not too fussed about this show. It felt like it was going a bit too slow for my taste and it hadn’t really done enough to separate itself from generic superhero-ness, coming into the second season I was just more watching it because I had watched the first season and I was willing to drop it. Then they get into the sports festival arc. They start pitting the characters against one another and it becomes 10 times more interesting and much more enjoyable – where every episode is two characters facing up against one another. They continue to combine their powers in interesting ways and they
clash their personalities alongside the physical battles in ways that made the show so much more compelling in that I was watching it and finishing the episode and thinking “Oh, I enjoyed that way more than I thought I was going to. I’m way more into this show that I thought I was.”
That is why, again, I compare it to an idea of a really good Saturday morning cartoon. I was looking forward to this every single week for season 2 because I could just sit down and I knew I was going to get 22 minutes of a fun action series. Where you get really stellar animation, well-developed characters – all of the characters are fundamentally kind of set in their ways because that just is the way that Shonen tends to lend itself… The person has to have a very firm mindset in order for it to be meaningful when they change it, and so it does tend to lead it to a bit of over-monologuing, which can bog down a lot of Shonen shows. But, that again is why I come back to the idea of it being a good Saturday morning cartoon. If you watch it week by week then I think that the monologuing would be maybe not as bad and I think that it maybe provides a bit of a pacing break between the action, which is nice. If you were to binge it all in one go I think that it could get quite bogged down in these moments. So the show got me back interested with the battles against one another and then that arc ended and I was disappointed, only for it to continue improving on what it already had with the introduction of the villain, Stain.
Which, again, is the perfect example of take something that has been done a hundred times before and give it a twist. Because he is a villain and he is asking “what does it mean to be a hero?” There’s already comments writing “Argh but that’s already been done in this film, that film, blah blah blah…” but what I mean is that he knows he is a villain, that’s the whole interesting factor of it, is that he is a villain that believes in heroes and he thinks that there are too many fake heroes about with the fact that they have become essentially like public servants and through that he is disgusted by so many weak heroes that he wants to draw out the strongest heroes and he wants people to be doing it not because they can make money doing it, he wants to push to make true heroes a thing again… and he’s doing that by becoming a serial killer. Which, again, in the kid show is kind of darker than you’re expecting – and the serial killing ties into his very interesting quirk. This alone is interesting enough but then it leads to him coming into combat with the kids. The eventual fight is a tiny bit dragged out for my liking, but even though it is a kids cartoon you can still worry for the state that the characters are going to get in, because it’s willing to go slightly darker than the usual show.
I think you could argue that the show is just kind of silly and maybe you could also argue that it’s a bit overhyped, and not as good as people think. But for me personally, while I do find that some episodes definitely vary in quality and some episodes don’t even need to exist like recap episodes. Ultimately I still found it fun to come back to every single week, which I can’t say for a lot of shows, and consistently entertaining and consistently well produced for something that, again, is a kids show. It could just be a very slapdash adaptation of the books but it is trying to be the best that it can be, and like I said it’s all covered with this optimism that just makes you really excited to watch it.
aI think there is a reason why this is becoming the next big series
out of Japan and I think that if anyone is interested in the Marvel films or at the very least interested in superheroes and is put off by the Marvel films. I’ve repeated it so many times in all the podcasts and
everything – I like superheroes, but the Marvel films, I just do not find them interesting anymore. I don’t get excited for them anymore. But
this… gets me excited again and this makes me happy to watch superheroes and see interesting powers. I missed flame powers, ice powers, stuff interacting with one another and actually having interesting combinations every week and always trying to find new ways to make it fun – as opposed to just increasingly bigger people punching each other.
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