If you have any love of SciFi at all, run, don’t walk, to your nearest online streaming service, log into Netflix, and start watching Sense8. Eight cities, what starts out being 8 people (who rapidly become one), and one central theme; Homo Sapiens are becoming Homo Superior, and the powers that be will do everything they can to kill them before they lose their own power to control the world forever. This brilliant series includes the Wachowskis as creators, but J. Michael Straczynski of Babylon 5 fame is the real storyteller here.
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.
Awesome Con in Washington D.C. this past weekend certainly lived up to its name, and its rep. They had a huge collection of actors, artists, and authors (and that only covered the first letter of the alphabet) doing their best to make the gathering memorable. Pretty much all of the guest actor/voice talent celebrities manned (personed?) a booth on the bottom level, off to the side of the hucksters area by the primary entrance, most of the time they were not doing a panel or presentation. Between those two groups were the artists, both Comics and Fine, with quite a few other visual disciplines mixed in. That last sentence gives you the idea, but not the scope, unless you expect there to be a hundred or more impressive illustrator/storytellers on the multiple-football-field sized area you are crossing to get to your next scheduled event.
They had some presentations I never expected, like Twisted Toonz, where a group of world class voice actors played out a famous movie as totally different characters than the ones in the original. This year the film was The Wrath of Kahn, and the voice of Wini The Pooh coming from the bridge of the Enterprise was one of the the least disconcerting aspects of that presentation. I can’t wait to see another show organized around the same principle, it was absolutely amazing and entertaining! Although the voice actor tasked with being Bill Cosby for one part of it kept looking out at the audience like he was trying to find an escape route.
In Movies this week we get Jupiter Ascending, another tasty sci-fi action romp from the Wachowski’s. We also get the direct to DVD Monsters: Dark Continent, taking place a decade after the original movie. Critics have commented it lacks the originality of its predecessor, and was instead just another war movie.
In TV we have Falling Skies: The Complete Fourth Season, coming out just in time to rewatch it before the 5th and final season starts on June 28th.
In Anime, Fairy Tail: Collection 4 has episodes 73 through 95, originally released as Fairy Tale parts 7 and 8. To put that in perspective Part 15 is about to come out on disc, and the current season is at episode 235. Also this week, Nobunagun is about alien invasion and a girl who can manifest weapons possessed by the spirits of historical figures. This is the complete series, 13 episodes in all.
Something of a trailer with a lot of commentary by the author, this intro video to the TV version of Blake Crouch’s Wayward Pines looks like the show just might be worth watching. It is very Twin Peaks and a bit X-Files, so I look forward to seeing how well Fox and the director tell the quality story embedded in the book. If you missed it when it first aired, you can catch it here.
The movie selection Seventh Son is about the battle between mankind and supernatural forces that want to control or annihilate us. Unfortunately, there are not a lot of 7th sons of a seventh son to defend us. I don’t know if this is the first time it is being released as a single box set or not, but all 118 episodes of the Roger Moore interpretation of The Saint: The Complete Series will also be hitting the shelves this week.
In Anime Magi: The Kingdom of Magic has Aladdin and Alibaba attempting to survive the war they stirred up as episodes 14 through 25 run their course. And to think it all started because they were invading dungeons to steal their treasure. Student Council’s Discretion: Level 2 has the characters rewriting their own anime, adding new characters, advancing others, and generally cranking the silliness factor up to 11. Particularly if you enjoy recursive humor (anime that makes fun of anime and manga, in this instance) this is a good show to watch.