This week sees Hardcore Henry on the big screen, a man who has been brought back from the dead by his wife just before she gets kidnapped. He has no memory and doesn’t know the city he is in, and his wife’s kidnapper is a powerful warlord with an army of mercenaries. Worse, he has a plan for world domination which involves reanimating the dead, which is how Henry came back. The movie was filmed first person style, so you spend the thing seeing everything from Henry’s viewpoint, which is a little confusing on the action sequences. I probably won’t be seeing this one myself, but it is genre so I had to mention it here.
Movies brings us Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which would be enough for me if that was all there was, but we get a bit more. Identicals is a rather twisty little film about people who take over the lives of others, to the point where they lose track of their own identity. Ghost in the Shell: The New Movie closes out the Ghost In The Shell: Arise prequel, ending with the scenes that began the very first movie. I get to mention it here rather then in the Anime section because it actually did play on the big screen in US theaters.
TV has Doctor Who: Complete Series 9, which was a fun season that I wouldn’t have minded if it had had still more episodes. We also get The Expanse: Season 1, a first class interpretation of the books series, and I am happy to see they have signed off on creating the second season.
In Anime, Parasyte The Maxim: Collection 1 is a tale of a body snatching alien and the human he permanently attached to when he mistakenly ate and replaced his hand, instead of his head. Now the rest of the invaders want them both dead, so they have to work together to survive in this first half of the series. Rail Wars takes place in a parallel time line where the nationalized railway system was never privatized. While a lot of the story arc is involved with agitators and saboteurs trying to take control of the rail system away from the government, a good bit of it is slice-of-life tales of the day to day workings of the system as valid in this universe as in that one. We also have new stories for a few old favorites, with Lupin the Third: Jigen’s Gravestone, and Naruto Shippūden: Uncut Set 26.
If you have played this even once, the reality of the Ratchet & Clank movie can be summed up with their tag line: Kick Some Asteroid! It will be on the big screen at the end of April, just a handful of weeks from now.
Imagine an animated feature film where each frame was painted by Vincent van Gogh; that is the concept behind Loving Vincent. So far just over 100 artists world wide have made the production team, and even if all they end up producing is the trailer they will have created something interesting. This is from Breakthru Films, the Polish film studio that created the award winning Peter And The Wolf a few years back.
The genre film this week is Pandemic, but I would rather seem Miles Ahead. The first is about a plague that threatens to wipe out all life on Earth and turn us all into Zombies, and I have already seen that movie twenty times too often, each time with a different cast. Miles Ahead is an indiegogo funded film about musical genius Miles Davis at a critical point in his life that I think has a lot of promise. So this time around I will be listening to the music.
Humans, Season 1 is about Synths, near-human robots who may be more than they appear. It was shown on AMC (US), the BBC (UK), and ABC (AU) and is based on the Swedish science fiction program Real Humans, which has won a number of awards. Kudos Film and Television remade it for English speaking audiences with a somewhat changed plot line, and Acorn is releasing the uncut UK version on disc.
In Anime, the Utawarerumono OAV adds three new stories to this world of magic and combat, with just a bit of silliness thrown in. The other two new releases are about the genre rather than genre themselves; Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-Kun is a rom/com about a Manga artist, while Saekano: How to Raise a Boring Girlfriend is a rom/com about a high school otaku who decides to build his own game about a girl in his class.