When the Suicide Squad movie comes out next year it should put quite a different spin on the whole Superhero film experience. After all, these are the bad guys. Sort of. We had a video taste of this team in Arrow, with a limited collection of the powered, and it looks like they expanded on the theme quite nicely for the big screen. While they are quite recent to video production, the print version made its first appearance in 1959, and transmuted into its current form and structure in 1987, finally becoming the modern version of itself on 2011. I will be in the theater for this one when it gets released in August of 2016.
The pick this week is obviously the latest release from Marvel, Ant-Man. It brings everybody’s favorite mad scientist, Dr. Hank Pym, to the big screen for the first time, although interestingly enough they chose a story in which Hank wasn’t the Ant-Man himself. Since Dr. Pym was a founding member of The Avengers, there will be some serious Avengers connectivity here, although it will be interesting to see where they go with it. After all, in different guises he was both a Super Hero and Super Villain, as his mind got warped by the mental changes induced by his various super-suites. One of the risks of being a true Mad Scientist, after all.
While that one is my first choice, there is a second movie I feel compelled to see this weekend. Mr. Holmes has Ian McKellen as a retired Sherlock Holmes grappling with an unsolved case involving a beautiful woman. This looks like an good story with some quality acting and production values, and shares something with the first film; Marvel. McKellen plays Magneto, Robert Downey Jr plays Iron Man, and Benedict Cumberbatch will be playing Dr Strange for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and now all three of them have played the iconic Sherlock Holmes.
I love all the great new stuff Comic Con brings us each year…
On July 5th the Death Note live-action TV series will premiere on Nippon TV, which doesn’t have great reception at my house in North America. All is not lost for American fans, however, because Crunchyroll will be airing the show just a few days behind its Japanese release date each week. Thanks to Otaku USA for the heads up on this one, although I will feel more confident about the information when Crunchyroll actually adds it to their menu system.
This isn’t the first Live Action Attack On Titan trailer, but it is the first one that includes visuals on the 3D Maneuver Gear which is the core of the defense groups arsenal, and has helped make the animation such a success. Then they did it not once, but twice. I am so ready for this production set, which will be released as a theatrical presentation (i.e. Movie) on August 1st, a short series of weekly shown TV shows covering the space between, and then the concluding Movie on September 19th. The release dates I am quoting are all for Japan, but with the world-wide excitement the original Manga and Anime have generated, I have very high hopes one of the streaming services will pick up on the TV series, and someone like American Multi-Cinema (AMC) (founded in 1920 Kansas City, Missouri, now owned by China) will carry the films. Keeping my fingers crossed, at least.
In movies this week we get Kingsman: The Secret Service, an action/adventure/comedy based on the Mark Miller Marvel comic book series The Secret Service. In TV we get The Last Ship: The Complete First Season, an end of the world thriller with a lot of action.
In Anime, Hyperdimension Neptunia is one of those recursive anime about gaming on thinly disguised platforms anthropomorphized as (of course) cute girls. Knights of Sidonia: Season 1 takes place a thousand years after the destruction of the Earth by the Gauna, with the remnants of Humanity still fleeing for their lives. This one is a Netflix original, and they have already signed on for season 2, which will be online on July 3rd. Mardock Scramble: The Trilogy puts both the directors cut and the theatrical version of these three movies into a single box set for the first time. Our protagonist is murdered in the first film’s opening sequence, and her memory recording (taken before her human body fully cooled down) spends the rest of the story wearing a cyborg body and attempting to bring her killer to justice. It is just as cyberpunk as Ghost In The Shell, and worth watching.