Steam-tech, Ghosts and Generica, oh my!
Steamboy - An anime set in Victorian England, directed by Katsuhiro Otomo. Thankfully, it’s nowhere near the incomprehensible mess that Akira was (Otomo’s best known film,) but it’s not a total success either.
The visuals are just totally lush. The blended 2D and 3D scenes work really well, and steam age technology is intrinsically cool. I’m a sucker for the hugely intricate, overly complicated, mechanical look of it.
The story starts out fine, but the ending is pretty weak and drags on for too long. It’s also one of the rare cases where I think watching the English dubbed version might be better. Seeing this whole film set in Manchester and London, with all the voices in Japanese and then being subtitled back into English was just amazingly head-explodey.
Dark Water - This was the American remake version, but it apparently keeps fairly close to the Japanese original, and this leads to the general observation that the Japanese really like their drowned ghost children stories.
The film was ok, but it sort of put me off going to watch the original version, which was playing a few days later. There seems to be a trend in recent Far-Eastern films for unremittingly bleak plots, where everything turns out horribly for everyone involved. I’m never sure what the message that I’m meant to take away from these films is, other than “Life’s a bitch and then you die.” See Old Boy and Princess Blade for further examples.
Fantastic Four - Almost everyone I’ve talked to about this movie has said “It wasn’t as bad as I was expecting.” So I’m not going to say that. I’m just going to be thinking it real hard.
The whole thing’s just totally generic. There’s nothing in it that’s able to make you love it or hate it. It’s the movie equivalent of cous cous. Basically, any time a potentially interesting scenario was set up, the film just copped out and went for the cliched solution. Overall, it scores a big old “Meh.”