20 September 2011

Movie review: Space Battleship Yamato (2010 live action)

I imprinted on Leiji Matsumoto's works at a very early age. I was about 5 (we only had HBO for a year), and I was watching the cartoons they showed one day. There was a kid, a space train, and this woman with long blonde hair, which was all I could remember about it until I found a VHS (remember those?) of Galaxy Express 999 at Suncoast (remember them?) when I was in college. Those were the days when you had to pay extra for the "collector's edition," which was Japanese audio with subtitles, because those letters were really expensive.

Back in the 80s, Matsumoto's other main work, Space Battleship Yamato, was dubbed into English and shown on American TV as Star Blazers, renaming ace pilot Kodai Susumu to Derek Wildstar. (I almost put Rick Hunter there, but that's what Ichijou Hikaru ended up as in Robotech, the US adaptation of Macross.) This fan site has plot summaries.

Last December, the live action movie was released in theaters, starring quite a few famous Japanese actors like Kimura Takuya (from the J-drama and movie Hero, about a lawyer, among other things). They made a few changes, notably making Dr Sado, of the bottle of sake and large orange cat, a woman, making it a little less of a sausage-fest. Still, there are only three named women on the Yamato: Sado, Mori Yuki, and the one whose name I forget but who's one of the Black Tigers.

It's the year 2199, and about five years ago, meteor bombs started hitting the Earth, making the surface too irradiated to live on and sending people underground to try to eke out a living. Humanity is fighting off Gamilas attacks, and everything they do, the Gamilas adapt to counter them. Captain Okita is leading an assault/defense force at Mars, and the Gamilan fleet is too strong for their weaponry. Kodai Mamoru, captain of the Yukikaze, uses his ship as a shield to allow Okita to escape and take the news to Earth.

Kodai Susumu is a scavenger. He goes out looking for metal to take to the military. While he's out scavenging, a strange object falls from the sky and knocks off his protective gear. He picks it up and mysteriously survives the deadly radiation levels. At the same time, Okita's ship returns. He takes the object to the military, and they examine it and find coordinates for planet Iscandar, where the Gamilas come from, and blueprints for a warp engine and a powerful weapon, the wave motion gun.

The leader of the military decides to send the Yamato out to Iscandar to find a decontamination device, which would allow people to move back to the surface, and Kodai joins up again. He'd been an ace pilot at the time of the initial Gamilan attacks, but he left after a personal tragedy. He is angry at Okita, because he believes Okita sacrificed his brother in order to escape. He meets up with his old buddies, the Black Tigers.

The name for the ship wasn't chosen at random. The Yamato was a WW2 battleship that was sent on a mission to defend Okinawa until it was destroyed, to give the Japanese people a last hope (as Kodai explains in a speech at the end). Pasting from wikipedia, Yamato's symbolic might was such that some Japanese citizens held the belief that their country could never fall as long as the ship was able to fight. The word Yamato also carries significance in Japan as a poetic name for the country and remains as a metaphor for the end of the empire.

While they're in transit, they're repeatedly attacked by Gamilan forces, and when they eventually make it to Iscandar, they find something unexpected. I won't spoil the ending, but I saw it coming, because I've seen the old anime movies.

At times, it's goofy. I couldn't help but laugh at the Star Trek-like "the bridge is shaking, everybody lean to the right and look like you're hanging on" effects, but the CG was really nice. I couldn't figure out why they made a land assault at Iscandar rather than stay in their nice ships, other than to allow for heroism and sacrifice. The zero-g-love scene made me giggle (mainly because it put this song in my head). But it's based on one of the classics of science fiction anime, and even as it changes and updates a few things (like the Gamilans being energy beings (they're still blue, though) and the Cosmo Zero having something like a Valkyrie's Gerwalk mode, probably just because it looks cool), it's still the story Matsumoto wrote at its core.

It's worth seeing, if you know how to get hold of it. There's no word yet of an English release.

08 September 2011

Back from Dragon*Con

I've actually been back since Monday evening, but Tuesday my lack of sleep caught up with me in the form of a low-grade migraine (sinus pressure, headache, no appetite, mild sensitivity to light), and yesterday I had to get back into my normal routine.

I had a lot of fun, as usual, though there weren't as many panels or people I wanted to see this year. Yeah, they had Tom Felton (Draco Malfoy), but he wasn't my favorite, and I don't think he could top Matthew Lewis' panel from a few years ago. I really enjoyed Eric Flint's panel in the alternate history track about Marxism. It was a guided discussion (by a moderator, who asked questions like "How does your Marxism influence your writing?" and "How do you portray class in your works?") between him and SM Stirling (who is very much not a Marxist), which was incredibly interesting. It gave me a few things to think about for my writing.

This year I watched the parade, which I hadn't done in any of the previous five years I've gone. It's a great way to see a lot of cool costumes without much effort. Also, the whole lot of Stormtroopers bringing up the rear (yay, 501st) is a really impressive sight.

I also got my copy of Shades of Milk and Honey signed.

There weren't a whole lot of shiny things for me in the dealers halls, though I bought a t-shirt from an artist's table (it was tan! with a cute kitsune on it!) and two model kits from Gundam 00. And a statue of Ozma Lee's Valkyrie from Macross Frontier. Not much else really jumped out at me.

I really enjoy going to Dragon*Con; it's a 4-day nerd party, where you don't get judged for wanting to dress up like Superman or Batman or Zatanna or Captain Harlock or a space Marine or an alien or a zombie, vampire, werewolf, or Macho Man Randy Savage or ... you get the point. It's getting ridiculous to get hotel rooms; rumor has it the Hilton is already sold out for next year (though I'm skeptical of that). The Marriott and Hyatt sell out within hours of the block opening.

I want to attend a World Con sometime soon, but, annoyingly, the next two are Labor Day weekend. Not that I could afford to go to both even if they were different weekends, mind. 2012 is going to be in Chicago, 2013 in San Antonio. 2014 hasn't been voted on yet, but London's bid is unopposed. I can't afford to go to London, and being in London is extremely expensive (especially since it's usually 2 pounds to the dollar, and a sit-down meal will cost you 20 pounds or so). I'm not super excited about San Antonio; it's Labor Day weekend. Atlanta is hot enough, and I don't want to go someplace hotter. Which means Chicago next year is the likeliest option in the near future. I've never really visited Chicago, and depending on how things work out with the hotel and travel days, we could have a short vacation there.

Which leads to an additional problem. My oldest cat, Isis, is an evil tortie, and she has diabetes. The cat sitter we hired for last weekend had so much trouble with Her Evilness that she had to bring a second person to help hold her to get her shot, for which we owe her additional monies. It stressed Isis out badly enough that she must have had a sugar spike, because she was sick when we got home and is on two different antibiotics right now. She doesn't hate our usual cat sitter, but she's got a second job now, which gives her crazy hours, so she's not always available. Maybe by next year, she'll have enough seniority not to get the shit hours.

We need to decide fairly quickly, though. Memberships are $175 each right now, and the price goes up October 1. Blech. (I understand why they're so expensive: each World Con committee has only one chance to recoup their costs for guest transport, hotel rental, etc. I can still think it's too damned expensive.)