Neil Sharpson's Blog, page 20

F*ck it, I’m doing all the animé.

Ah animé, my manic-depressive, intermittently abusive spouse of an art form. When you are good, you are very, very good. When you are bad, you are horrid. And when you are weird…well, you’re never not weird so that’s an exercise in redundancy.

Here in the Mouse House animé has actually been having a bit of a moment. Ms Mouse has been binging the Ace Attorney animé as an accompaniment to re-visiting the games on Switch, and I’ve been thoroughly enjoying Cells at Work. That said, and despite having reviewed well over a dozen animé movies and TV shows by this point, I wouldn’t call myself an animé fan (much, much less an authority). Partly that’s because there’s just so damn much of it, and I find it impossible to have a single unified opinion on all of it. It’s like saying “I like food”. Some food is awesome. Some food is made by force-feeding geese. I don’t feel comfortable offering a blanket endorsement.

Oh but hey, do you know who does love animé? You beautiful people. In fact, I got so many requests for specific episodes of various animé shows that I’ve decided to just blitz them all in one post and actually make some progress on that damned list that haunts my every waking moment like Banquo’s ghost.

“Mouse, Moooouse, you said you’d review the Xena and Hercules cartoon all the way back in 2017!”“Do not shake thy gorey locks at me! It’s not streaming anywhere and it’s $100 on Ebay! FOR A VHS!!”

So these are going to be light, snacky little reviews. I’m not doing any in depth research, I am going in cold, watching these episodes, and telling you if liked them or if I did not, in fact, like them. I’m not going to be doing in depth analysis. I’m not going to be giving you background on their creation. None of that, no sir. In and out and over with in a few minutes which is the most satisfying way to do anything, I have been assured.

Internet reviewing like Momma used to blog. Let’s do this. Garcon? Could you please bring out the appetiser?

“At once monsieur.”

Watch me do the Instagram

We are 13 hours and counting away from when those mad fools at Tor actually give me control of their Instagram feed despite the fact that I still think MySpace is pretty fetch.

I’ll be in conversation with celebrated sci-fi author Max Gladstone, we will be going live at 7 pm and it will be an absolute car-crash.

The link is here and I would love to see as many of you lovely folks there as can make it.

Get your sneak peek of When the Sparrow Falls!

Publication date is looming like a big loom and you can now get an exclusive first peak at When the Sparrow Falls HERE!

And the best part is, I didn’t have to get an Instagram account…

Hello peeps, if you happen to be on the internet at April 28th I’ll be taking over the Tor Books Instagram Account with fellow sci-fi author, the Nebula Award winning Max Gladstone (uh, the “fellow” part is us both being science fiction authors, not having Nebulas). Join us on Debuts After Dark where we’ll be talking about writing and science fiction and…I dunno…smooth jazz.

Then, we shall battle our evil anti-matter universe doubles for the fate of the universe.

The link is here and I would love to see as many of you lovely folks there as can make it.

From Tor:

“Join Neil Sharpson, author of When the Sparrow Falls, and Max Gladstone, author of Empress of Forever, as they take over the Tor Books Instagram account LIVE for Debuts After Dark! Who knows what shenanigans they’ll get up to…”

“Uh Tor? That kinda sounds like Max Gladstone and I are going to make out.”“You wanna be a big star, dontcha?”“Sigh. Still better than working in the Civil Service.”

I promise I will make this up to you…

Yup.

Yeah.

Sorry.

Yeah.

I know I haven’t been posting a lot this year.

I hear your concerns and they are valid.

Here’s what’s been happening. As you almost certainly know (because I have not been subtle), my first book is coming out at the end of June. What you may not know is that my second novel was actually originally due to be submitted to the publisher THIS month. Now, they very kindly agreed to give me an extension what with the once-in-a-generation global pandemic. Here in Ireland creches and schools have only recently re-opened so I’m only catching up on writing now.

Basically, I’m racing a June deadline with a good chunk of the book still be written. Coupled with that, I’ll be doing a lot of guest posts and interviews and whatnot to promote When the Sparrow Falls. So for the time being, the monthly update schedule will have to remain. (Man, remember when I used to post reviews weekly? Seriously, that happened, I went back and checked).

BUT.

Once the second book has been handed in and Sparrow has taken flight, I’ll be diving headfirst back into the blog. Because dammit, I really want to. I miss talking with you guys, I miss writing about animation, I miss the whole Mouse scene, daddio.

We will be doing Raya. We will be doing Wandavision. We will be doing Disney series galore. We will be doing X-Men and Bolts versus Bats and all the promised reviews. I’m also planning on doing posts that aren’t reviews necessarily; like the Rabbit Rhapsody/Cat Concerto controversy, why The Book Job is the best latter season Simpsons episode and why the “You lose, good day sir!” scene in Willy Wonka is perfection. I miss doing stuff like that. Like I miss doing lots of stuff lately.

But you know what? This week I told the job that I’ve been working in for thirteen years that I was going on a four year career break to finally pursue my dream of becoming a full time writer.

Infection numbers are going down, vaccination numbers are going up.

And for the first time in a long time, the future is starting to look real bright.

Hopefully, you’ll be seeing a lot more of me around here before too long.

Thanks for being so understanding.

Mouse.

Oh, and next month I’ll be doing a little event called: FUCK IT I’M DOING ALL THE ANIMÉ

I have a load of random episodes from different animé series to review so fuck it, let’s put that Crunchy Roll account to good use.

The End of Evangelion (1997)

Okay, so back when…

No wait, y’know what, we need to go back in time if I’m going to tell this story right.

Further than that.

Further…

Little more…

Perfect. Okay so.

It’s my third year in college and I’ve started going out with this dynamite gal who will, unbeknownst to her, one day be known as “Spouse of Mouse” to a bunch of randos on the internet. Now we’re at that awkward early stage of the relationship where we’re starting to realise that we can’t just keep kissing constantly and we should probably figure out if we have any actual…y’know…common interests.

So I pull my calloused lips off her and says to her, I says “what are you into?”

And she says “Oh…y’know. Comics. Movies. Animé. That kinda stuff.”

Now, believe it or not, but at this early point in the Earth’s history where the molten surface was still hardening, I had not yet seen that much animé. I mean, Pokémon and Speed Racer, sure, but none of the really big name shows or movies. So I go into a video rental shop, avoiding debris from the recently formed Moon that rained down on the hellish surface of the Earth like so much fiery marble, and I go into the animé section and I see a DVD for a movie called Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death & Rebirth. I had heard the name before, but I knew nothing about it and figured “hey, if it’s so famous that even a total noob like me has heard of it, it must be a great entry point to this exciting world of animé! This will be a great way to bond with my new girlfriend who I hope to one day marry and make a supporting character in a weirdly detailed animation review blog/ongoing comedy series!”

So we sit down to watch this movie together, and around ten minutes in she turns around, takes my arm in a vicelike grip and stares straight into my eyes with a gimlet gaze.

“I’m sorry” she said. “I don’t like animé. I just wanted you to think I was cool. Can we please watch something else?!“

And we turned off the movie and watched Family Guy instead. Because, Christ help us, we were young and in love and knew no better.

So that was my first introduction to Evangelion and honestly, I could scarcely have picked a worse one. I know now that Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death & Rebirth is one half clip show with the first 26 episodes of the TV series edited into a single 70 minute cut almost perfect in its incomprehensibility for a newcomer, and the other half the first twenty minutes of what would become The End of Evangelion that was due to be released several months later.

And they did this because…because…

Honestly, maybe spite? Like, just another thing to fuck with people trying to make sense of what often seems like a deliberately opaque franchise? Pity anybody trying to make sense of Evangelion, and that’s before they even have to tackle the plot.

There’s the original 26 episode animé series which ended with a finalé so despised that Gainax received death threats.

There’s Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death & Rebirth which is basically the world’s most inscrutable “previously on Buffy” and which also has two alternate versions: Evangelion: Death(True) and Evangelion: Death(True)2 (and Tigger too!)

And then you have The End of Evangelion, which I will be tackling in this very post, which aims to be the true ending of the TV series.

Then there’s the Rebuild series, an entirely new ongoing four movie cycle re-telling the events of the original show and The End of Evangelion which aims to give ANOTHER ending to this rigmarole (sure, why not?).

Oh and there’s the manga (different continuity), the ANIMA light novel series (ditto) the PS2 game, the parody series, the audio dramas, the commemorative plates and on and on it goes. This thing is a beast.

But okay, here goes, I will now attempt to describe what the hell Neon Genesis Evangelion actually is.

Alright, so the original TV series is not that hard to get a handle on. Basically, it’s like Power Rangers with the following changes:

There are three teenagers not five.Instead of Zordon, there’s a super shadowy organisation called NERV that recruits these teenagers to defend their city of Tokyo 3 from giant alien monsters.Instead of being possessed pumpkins and pachinko machines, the alien monsters in this series are terrifying eldritch abominations known as Angels.The Zords are not robots, but bio-mechanical cyborgs known as EVAs.If you ever thought to yourself “Hey, wait a minute, doesn’t using teenagers as soldiers in his cosmic war kinda make Zordon a war criminal? And wouldn’t those teenagers be MONSTROUSLY traumatised by having to engage in lethal combat on a constant basis?” then Neon Genesis Evangelion is here to tell you “YA DOY!”.

So our…”hero” with the biggest quotation marks money can buy is Shinji Ikari, a teenaged boy who was abandoned by his father Gendo when he was a toddler.

From left to right: Shinji, Asuka, Rei and Kaworu with EVAS 1, 0 and 2 in the background.

When an angel attacks Tokyo 3, Shinji is taken to NERV which his father is running and told that he has to pilot an EVA to save the city. Terrified, but desperate to win his father’s approval, Shinji does and manages to defeat the monster. There are two other children who can pilot EVAs: Asuka Langley, a fiery-tempered German girl who treats Shinji to a near constant barrage of abuse to mask her own massive feelings of inadequacy, and Rei Ayanami a quiet, almost non-verbal girl who was the first child to be recruited as a pilot and who Gendo treats like a beloved child (thereby showing Shinji that his father is capable of paternal affection, he just doesn’t want to waste it on his only son). And they fight monsters in giant mechs.

And yeah, that’s pretty much it. I mean, there’s a load of really obscure lore and conspiracy stuff going on in the background but the meat of the series is watching these three incredibly damaged teenagers being manipulated by the adults around them into risking their bodies and sanity for the survival of mankind over and over again. Shinji in particular. Asuka actually seems to enjoy being a pilot even if it is directly tied to her own sense of self worth. Rei just does it with calm, emotionless passivity. But Shinji hates it. He’s terrified every time he gets in the cockpit. But, because it’s the only time he feels useful and validated by the people around him, he keeps doing it.

Then, Kaworu arrives.  Kaworu is the Fourth Child and forms a close and instant bond with Shinji. For the first time, Shinji has someone in his life who actually seems to care for him and like him just for him. Not for any ulterior motive. And then…it turns out that the 17th and final Angel who is supposed to bring about the end of the world; is Kaworu.

So Shinji Ikari. The boy who was abandoned by his father. Who is so desperate for the affection and approval of others that he will get inside one monster to battle other monsters.

That Shinji.

He now has to save the world by killing the only person who ever really loved him unconditionally.

That brings our synopses up to the penultimate episode of the TV series. And here’s where shit gets a little weird.

Episodes 25 and 26 of Neon Genesis Evangelion take place entirely inside Shinji’s head as he processes the enormity of what he’s done. These two episodes are surreal, and make heavy use of abstract images, photographs and even simple illustrations in place of fluid animation as well as heavy and repeated use of monologue. The original series ends with Shinji making a breakthrough: he needs to learn to value himself seperate from how other people see him.

And the audience, seeing their cool mech battle show wrapping up with David Lynch’s Masterpiece Fucking Theatre or Some Shit reacted with a collective…

Viewers in Japan were left perplexed, baffled and infuriated. In other words, they got a taste of what animé feels for everyone else in the world all the time.

“Ha! How do YOU like it, Japan?!”

Okay, all joking aside, what happened here?

Well the production of the latter part of NGE, and particularly these last few episodes, was by all accounts a bit of a shit show. Deadlines were running super tight, creator Hideaki Anno was grappling with a major mental health crisis, scripts were being re-written on the fly, the budget consisted of whatever could be shaken out of the sofa cushions, altogether not a fun time.

And episodes 25 and 26 do often feel like somebody found a way to render a complete mental breakdown in animation (well, “animation”). Now at the time, reaction to these episodes was so virulent that Gainax, the studio, were receiving death threats and the edifice of their studio was vandalised. Since then, while these two episodes are still viewed rather negatively there is a healthy cohort of fans who will tell you that 25 and 26 are GENIUS actually and you just don’t get it PEARLS BEFORE SWINE I SAY.

What do I think? Well, I like the idea of dramatising Shinji’s emotional journey as the climax of the series. I like the ending a lot. In concept I think it’s really good. But…I think Anno flubbed the execution.

And no, I don’t mean the ropey animation. I actually think that’s a great example of artists turning weaknesses into strengths and using the limitations they were working under to produce something visually striking. But there is soooooo much of these episodes that is just characters telling Shinji in dull monotones why he’s feeling the way he is and what he needs to do. And these aren’t good monologues either. They manage that awful trick of being simultaneously obvious and needlessly opaque. And, sorry, this is not good storytelling. I’m not a Show Don’t Tell zealot, but this is exactly why that rule exists. Shinji is literally talked all the way to the resolution.

It’s not a failure of concept, but it is a failure of execution. And there is a colossal sense of anti-climax at the end of this series. An almost visceral gut punch of “was that it?”.

And reaction to this ending was so universally negative that, in 1997 Gainax released The End of Evangelion, a feature length movie that was meant to be the true, uncompromised ending that the creators had always intended.

What it actually is…well, there’s significant debate over that.

Okay, before we go any further, despite all my snark up until now I actually really like NGE as a whole. Yes, it’s inscrutable and sometimes insufferably pretentious but it’s got an atmosphere all it’s own and I love it far more than I am irritated by it. And if you are down for some beautiful, surreal, shockingly violent, head-scratching, beard-stroking animé you honestly could not do much better than The End of Evangelion. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I find all of the theorising and conjecture surrounding the film to be so, so much more entertaining and fascinating than the actual film itself. Let’s take a look.

The movie begins with its most infamous scene.

So at this point in the story Rei is dead, Shinji has just killed Kaworu and Asuka is lying comatose in hospital having been beaten in battle against an angel. Traumatised by his own actions, Shinji visits Asuka in hospital and begs her to wake up and yell at him like she always used to do. He shakes her, which causes her hospital gown to open, exposing her breasts. And then Shinji…um. Well, a picture speaks a thousand words.

I did not say they were pleasant words.

You will probably not be surprised to learn that, for the purposes of this review, I have created a folder of gifs simply titled “WTF”. Let’s crack that open.

Now, it’s been persuasively argued elsewhere that this movie more generally and this scene in particular is Hideaki Anno’s rather blunt response to his own fanbase in the aftermath of the vitriolic reaction to the original series finalé. Here is Shinji Ikari, the audience surrogate character, being an absolute (and literal) wanker. And when you put it like that it almost seems too obvious. I’m not at all sure that this interpretation is wrong, but honestly I’m not sure that it’s right either. It could just as easily be that Shinji Ikari, the character, finally beaten down by a lifetime of trauma and neglect, has been reduced to this absolute moral and spiritual nadir and that there is no meta-textual commentary intended. Like much of this film, it’s entirely open to interpretation and I think it’s quite possible that no one knows the true answer, least of all Anno himself, who was, rather notoriously, making a lot of this stuff up as he went along.

Okay, so now that the 17th and final Angel is just so much strawberry jam between the finger cracks of EVA 01, the team at NERV are sitting around and wondering what they’re supposed to do now that the apocalypse has been averted. The scientists figure that NERV will be mothballed and they’ll have to find new jobs that will best suit their skills of giant robot repair and experience with massive holographic displays the size of Denmark. Oh shit, I haven’t mentioned Misato yet. Okay. Major Misato Katsuragi.

So she’s Gendo’s second in command overseeing NERV as well as acting as Shinji’s guardian. She’s also a hot, badass, drunken mess and I love her. Misato has gone rogue and started investigating the Human Instrumentality Project which is…y’know what, I’m just going to take a screenshot of the Evangelion Wiki’s super easy to understand explanation.

See, I was confused until they mentioned the Chamber of Guf and then it all made sense.

Alright, as far as I understand it (and that may not be very far) the Human Instrumentality Project is an attempt to unify the entire human race in a single consciousness, thereby eliminating hatred, loneliness and misunderstanding between all human beings. You know, like what happened when we created the internet.

The Project was SUPPOSED to begin when Kaworu merged with Lilith, the giant crucified alien that NERV keeps in its basement.

Just roll with it.

When Kaworu failed as a result of being given the firmest handshake in history, SEELE decided that they needed to get shit done themselves. So they put in a call to the Japanese military and order them to kill everyone in NERV and take all their stuff, including the EVAS, their three super computers called the Magi and the big creepy alien in their basement. They will then trigger the Human Instrumentality Project and kick humanity into one big cuddle pile.

Misato is not cool with this because she believes in free will and all that shit and organises the defence of NERV when the Japanese troops arrive. And honestly, this whole sequence of the movie kicks so much ass. Even if you’re not entirely sure what’s going on it’s a tightly paced, brutal little war movie nestled in the middle of this thing like a swallowed hand grenade. Misato reasons that the invaders will be after the three children to kill them before they can activate their EVAs so she orders Asuka’s comatose body to be placed in EVA 02 and moved to the bottom of the lake while she goes to save Shinji. The team can’t find Rei, however, and Misato orders them to locate her ASAP.

“Waaaait a minute, you said Rei was dead!”

 

“I DID say that.”

BUT Rei is actually one of a seemingly endless number of clones that can be replaced at will. Oh and she is ALSO a clone of Gendo’s wife and Shinji’s mother Yui which of course you know because that particular bit of vital background information was disclosed in a pamphlet sold to Japanese cinema goers who saw The End of Evangelion in its original release almost a quarter of a century ago. It’s not my fault if you don’t put the legwork in guys, I’m not here to hold your hand.

Anyway, Shinji is by this point in a near catatonic depression and doesn’t even react when some soldiers show up to ice him. At the last minute Misato arrives and takes out three heavily armed assault troops with a fucking handgun because she is that much of a stone cold badass. Misato tells Shinji that he needs to get to EVA 01 and go Godzilla on these fools but he’s so far gone she has to literally drag him every step of the way.

“C’mon Shinji! We need to…why are your hands sticky?”

As they drive to the bay where EVA 01 is kept Misato gives Shinji some of that good, old-timey exposition. SEELE are trying to take control of the EVAs so they can trigger the Third Impact, y’see. But it turns out that the Angels were actually just…alternate forms of humanity. Like, they were what humanity could potentially have evolved into.

Well, Darwin. I imagine you’re feeling QUITE the fool.

For you see, humanity was the 18th Angel all along! Or something.

Meanwhile, Asuka awakes from her coma inside EVA 02 at the bottom of the lake. At first she’s terrified but she hears a voice in her head and realises that the EVA is speaking to her and that it actually contains the soul of her mother who committed suicide in front of her when she was a child. This trauma, incidentally, is the reason why Asuka is driven to excel at everything she does, because she’s trying to prove herself to the mother who she feels abandoned her for not being good enough and JESUS CHRIST CAN SOMEBODY JUST GIVE ONE OF THESE KIDS A HUG?

Anyway, we now get an astonishingly awesome fight scene where Asuka, now empowered with the knowledge that her mother was watching over her and protecting her the whole time, just wrecks shop on the entire Japanese military. It’s just…I struggle to describe how astonishingly satisfying this scene is to watch. It works so sublimely because, as well as being just a phenomenally visceral and kinetic sequence of giant robot action, it’s also hugely emotionally satisfying. This little girl finally knows that her mother really loved her and that makes her an invincible goddess of DEATH.

In response, SEELE launches a squad of nine mass-produced EVAS who have some of the most beautifully creepy monster designs I can recall seeing.

“Why so serious?”

Via radio, Misato tells Asuka that she will have to destroy all nine knock-off EVAs despite being low on power and Asuka’s all “what, like it’s hard?” and leaps into battle.

While literally dragging Shinji to EVA 01, Misato gets shot but tells Shinji that the wound is minor. She pushes Shinji into an elevator and tells him that he will have to finish the journey on his own. Shinji, filled with self-loathing and grief over what he’s done to both Kaworu and Asuka, tells her he can’t do it. Misato tells him that he hurts other people because he’s filled with self-loathing and hurting other people actually hurts him more than it hurts them which is actually a pretty dickish thing to say to a kid who killed his boyfriend to save every human being on Earth. But she gives him some good advice, saying that his decisions matter and have consequences, and that she knows from experience that its possible to break out of the cycle of self-loathing. And then she kisses the horribly traumatised 15 year old boy.

The English dub is even worse, she actually says “we’ll do the other stuff when you get back”.

Shinji’s erection then goes off to battle, closely followed by Shinji. And Misato succumbs to her wounds, which were much worse than she let Shinji know, and keels over dead in the corridor. Ohhhhhh…okay. So, she wasn’t actually going to rape Shinji, she was just using the promise of sex to manipulate him into risking his life in brutal combat against eldritch horrors one last time.

Well, that’s alright then, carry on.

Meanwhile, Asuko is fighting a losing battle against the mass produced EVAs and angrily screaming that she could never rely on that “idiot Shinji”. All of which Shinji can overhear over the base radio because of course he can.

While that’s going on, Gendo and Rei stand before Lilith. See, Gendo is planning on using Rei to trigger the Third Impact so that he can be reunited with his wife Yui who he has already cloned multiple times and whose soul is powering EVA Unit 01 and (I think?) EVA Unit 00 so like, dude, how much dead wife do you need? Another thing I don’t get? SEELE and Gendo both want to trigger the Third Impact so what are they even fighting about? If they both want the same thing, what’s with the frickin’ military intervention? Maybe why you want to trigger the apocalypse is the important thing?

Anyway, he’s held at gunpoint by Ritsuko Akagi who is one of the scientists who oversaw the EVA project. Ritsuko tries to trigger the base’s self-destruct in order to stop him. But it fails because one of the base’s supercomputers, Caspar, is actually the consciousness of Ritsuko’s mother who was also Gendo’s lover. Ritsuko is distraught, saying to her mother “you chose your lover over your own daughter?”

“Bitch, maybe I just don’t want to blow up? You ever consider that?”

Then, in a scene that has driven the fans mad with speculation for years, Gendo points his gun at her and they have an exchange where his dialogue is muted so that we only see her reaction. I really like this, because you can imagine he’s saying whatever makes the scene most meaningful for you.

“…think Kingdom Hearts had a great story.”

And Gendo shoots her, despite the fact that Kingdom Hearts is a glob of sputum spat in the eye of narrative herself.

You know, it doesn’t surprise me at all that NGE has such a rabid cult following. The show and movies seem tailor made to be treated like religious texts. They’re full of battles and great deeds and stunning imagery, but also maddeningly vague, esoteric and laden with symbolism that can interpreted 101 different ways. If, 1000 years from now, there’s a major religion based around this show I would not be surprised in the slightest.

On the surface, Asuka puts up a valiant effort but is overpowered by the mass-produced EVAs who tear 02 apart like seagulls eating a ham sandwich. 

Shinji hears the whole thing but can’t do anything because Unit 01 is encased in bakelite and he can’t get into it. But suddenly, 01 activates on its own and busts free.

On the surface, the Japanese soldiers watch in horror as Unit 01 strides towards them like something out of Revelations.

And then Shinji sees the remains of EVA Unit 02 and what the seagull-EVAs did to Asuka.

And Shinji. Loses. His. Frickin. Shit.

He melts down so hard he temporarily ends the movie. Seriously, the credits start rolling in the middle of the film. Really weird orange, screensaver font too. I mean, obviously it’s brilliant. To put a movie’s credits in the middle of the movie is plainly a darkly satirical meta-commentary on…

“Nah. Editor was drunk off his ass.”

“Yeah, that was my second guess.”

Okay everyone, kindergarten is over. Now the movie gets a little weird.

In fact, what follows is something that Wikipedia simply describes as “several dreamlike contemplations” because they are quitters. Here is how it goes down, listen close, I am NOT going to repeat any of this.

EVA 01 gets crucified in the sky by the mass-produced EVAs which triggers a massive explosion that reveals a black moon buried in the surface of the Earth that is apparently Lilith’s Egg, the source of all human life.

Rei merges with Lilith who turns into a massive Rei who keeps growing until she towers over the very clouds and sees Shinji who is still in EVA 01 which (as previously mentioned) has been crucified in the sky.

Man. Who’d want to be reviewing a normal movie? Not me. No sir.

Shinji starts freaking out and screaming like he’s never seen an alabastar white, 10 mile high, glowing red eyed clone of his dead mother standing naked in front of him while he sits trapped in a cyborg miles over the Earth that was crucified by the evil cyborg seagulls that ate the girl whose comatose body he was masturbating over just this very morning. Because he is a little bitch.

But here’s where things get a little weird. The mass-produced EVAs begin to resonate with Rei and turn into clones of her while Shinji watches with an entirely appropriate expression.

Okay, but here’s where it gets a little weird. A giant white Kaworu emerges from the giant Rei’s body and Shinji’s overjoyed to see him. But then the Spear of Longinus, which was an alien artifact left on the moon, flies down and pierces EVA 01, transforming it into a gigantic crucifix covered in eyes.

I’m just going to say it. My religion teacher was asleep at the fucking wheel.

We now move into a surreal sequence of flashbacks and internal monologues that feels a lot like the original final two episodes of the series but with, y’know, an actual budget. And it’s here that the central question of whether or not this movie is just a massive “fuck you” from Anno to the fanboys really comes to the fore. Having watched the movie a few times now, I’m more inclined to think that the answer is “no”. Or rather, that it’s not so much a “fuck you” as an “I love you son, but sit down. We need to have a serious fucking talk.”

Shinji Ikari…

Shinji Ikari is one of the most heart-breakingly real fictional characters you will ever come across. And what I think this movie does so, so well is to walk an incredibly fine line: One the one hand; Shinji is awful. He’s entitled and self-pitying and full of rage and resentment. He needs, he demands love and affection from others but is so clearly mired in self-loathing that others instinctively pull away from him. And he objectifies the women in his life, unable to see them truly as human beings but simply as things can provide him with what he thinks he wants.

Affection, love, sex, respect.   

He is a pretty terrible teenage boy well on the way to becoming a truly terrible man just like his father.

But on the other hand.

Well, he’s not wrong. He does deserve love. Because he’s a child. And all children deserve love. 

Shinji Ikari is a child who has been subjected to truly horrific emotional and physical trauma and abuse. How the hell was he ever supposed to become a good, happy person? When what was that ever an option? It’s a rare movie that can make a protagonist who feels simultaneously abhorrent and deeply, heart-breakingly tragic and even sympathetic. Which is why I shie away from the “fuck you, fanboys” hypothesis. Because it feels that what Anno is doing here is far more thoughtful and sincere. Maybe he is trying to hold up a mirror to those kids who sent death threats to his studio when they didn’t get the ending to they wanted to their show about teenage girls in skin-tight uniforms having mech battles with giant aliens. But maybe he’s also trying to show the rest of us that monsters aren’t born. They’re made.

Shinji hallucinates (dreams? experiences?) an encounter with Asuka in their kitchen where he begs her to love her and she furiously rejects him, saying that he doesn’t want her to love him, he just wants anyone to and she’s just a means to an end for him. And Shinji reacts by strangling Asuka.

Okay, here’s where the movie gets a little weird.

Back in the real world, everyone starts seeing visions of the person they love the most and then exploding into orange goo. Gendo sees Yui and tells her that he never believed that he could truly be loved and abandoned Shinji for his own protection. But Yui calls him out on his self-serving BS and tells him that he was just too much of a coward to ever risk loving anyone. And then Yui makes it very clear how she feels about how Gendo treated her son.

Look, I don’t like to see ANYONE eaten by a giant cyborg but if it has to be someone…

Meanwhile, in space:

“Alright Wonka that is QUITE ENOUGH!”

“There’s no earthly way of KNOWing which direction we are GOing…”

Shinji awakens to find himself and Rei floating in a pool along with the souls of every other human being. Rei tells him that this is the world he wanted, where the barriers between people have been let down and everyone is as one. Shinji now has a moment of revelation similar to what he had in the last episodes of the TV show; basically that he has to be nicer to himself and not put the responsibility of defining his self-worth on to other people. He tells Rei and Kaworu (who’s now there too) that he wants to return things things to how they were. Rei and Kaworu say that this will bring back the old pain and misunderstanding that arose from people seperate entities, but Shinji says that that’s the way it’s gotta be. 

The Third Impact ends, and Shinji and Asuka are transported to a beach somewhere on Earth.

So great, right? Shinji learned a valuable lesson, the apocalypse was averted, everything’s wrapped up in a neat little package, right?

So it’s here that the movie becomes a tad ambiguous and open to interpretation.

Shinji’s just about the luckiest kid in the world right now. He was able to save the world, he made a vital emotional and psychological breakthrough and the girl he loves is still alive. So what does he do?

He starts choking her again. Because he can’t change.

But he’s so physically weak he can’t even do that.

Asuka raises her hand and touches his face. Maybe trying to push him away. Maybe trying to show him some tiny gesture of affection.

Shinji releases her and begins to weep.

Asuka whispers  the last line of the film: “気持ち悪い” (“Kimochi Waru”) which has been translated as “I feel sick”, “How disgusting” or simply “Ugh”.

And that’s the end of the movie.

***

Okay, but seriously what the fuck? 

What exactly do we have here? Is this the true End of Evangelion and how does it relate to the original ending of the TV show? Is this what Anno intended all along? Or were the final two episodes really the ending that he intended and this movie is just a spiteful “fuck you” to the fans who threw their toys out of the pram after the series ended?

Firstly I suppose it’s possible to reconcile the two endings by saying that episodes 25 and 26 were all happening in Shinji’s head during the movie, you can’t really get around the fact that they are radically different endings, almost polar opposites.

There’s definitely a difference in tone, I don’t know if that’s coming across.

Truth is, I don’t think E of E is what Anno originally intended as the ending for his series because I don’t think he knew what he intended. Dude was constantly re-writing the scripts for those final two episodes and I get the feeling he hadn’t figured out how he wanted to end it. The movie feels less like the uncompromised version of that original finale, and more like a quite radically different second draft from a writer who’s had a chance to reflect on what he really wants to say.

Is it really a “fuck you” to the fanboys? Maybe in individual scenes, but I think the whole is animated by something much grander and more powerful than simple petty spite. It is by far the superior ending.

Episodes 25 and 26 may be more uplifting, but the resolution also feels unearned and not a little cheap.

The ending of End of Evangelion is savagely, breathtakingly bleak. But its final moments feel at once shocking and the perfect culmination of what has gone before. It has an austere, painful, transcendent beauty and puts this weird, baffling thing over the line into the realm of a masterpiece.

Scoring

Animation 17/20

Uneven, but incredibly visceral and absolutely, stunningly beautiful.

Leads: 18/20

DISCLAIMER: Unshaved Mouse’s high score for Shinji Ikari should be taken as a reflection of the layered and deeply effective characterisation of an extremely damaged young man and as a study of toxic entitled masculinity and should in no way be taken as an endorsement of jerking it over coma patients.

Villain: 19/20

Is he fun? No. Is he deliciously diabolical? No. Is he depressingly realistic? Yes. Fuck you, Gendo.

Supporting Characters: 18/20

Not gonna lie, around sixteen of those points are for Asuka.

Music: 14/20

End of Evangelion continues the proud NGE tradition of beautiful classical music choices coupled with…really incongrous pop music that’s incredibly distracting. Oh, and while I’m slaughtering sacred cows, I NEVER LIKED A CRUEL ANGEL’S THESIS!

FINAL SCORE: 86%

NEXT UPDATE: May 11th 2021

MOUSE ARE YOU TAKING THE PISS: Please don’t make a scene, let’s discuss this in the next post.

My book, When the Sparrow falls, is now available for preorder! Links here.

Non Americans, your time has come!

Yes my friends, we may not have freedom, apple pie and eagles, but there is one thing that those perfidious Yankees can no longer lord over us!

When the Sparrow Falls is now available for request on UK Netgalley!

Give it a request! Give it a read! Give it a review! Only if it’s a good one!

Nah, nah, just kidding. Be honest. You know. If you want to CRUSH my fragile spirit.

Hahhahaha! Just kidding!

But seriously, I live for your approval

JOKE!

Oh god this was a huge mistake.

Shin Godzilla (2016)

I suppose I should just make this confession upfront; I’m not a Kaijiu fan. Never have been.

Not writing off an entire genre, obviously but it appears to me to be a genre chiefly relying on empty spectacle as a consequence of focusing on a main character incapable of speech, higher level reasoning or emotional growth.

That said, I have been watching the Kong versus Godzilla trailer on repeat and the sight of the two titular monsters duking it out on top of an aircraft carrier is the fucking coolest thing I have ever seen.

I am not made of stone.

So…Godzilla. My experience with this character is as follows:

Godzilla 1954

What can I say? Classic of world cinema.

Godzilla 1998

I have a lot of fond memories of this one for purely personal reasons. Yeah, it’s dumb as all hell but it’s not as terrible as people say.

Godzilla 2014

Honestly, I’d fallen asleep before Watanabe said “Let them fight” though I’m told that makes it all worth it. Must have been a hell of a delivery, I wouldn’t know.

Aaaaand that’s it. So yeah, three Godzilla movies and only one of them was Japanese.

“Okay, so you have no cred whatsoever.”

“None!”

Oh wait, I tell a lie, I religiously watched the Saturday morning Godzilla cartoon  in the nineties.

SUPER under-rated show.

Man, Adelaide Productions, whatever happened to them? They also did the Men in Black cartoon which was another movie tie-in animation that was so much better than it had to be...

“Hey, hey, back on topic you!”

“Sorry, sorry. You can take the mouse out of the animation…”

“Sigh. Okay fine, this Godzilla movie was directed by Hideaki Anno.”

“Oooh, I can work with that.”

Hideaki Anno is a celebrated Japanese animator and filmmaker who has worked on dozens of films over a long celebrated career and none of that means jack shit because he created Neon Genesis Evangelion and he will never not be the “the guy who created Neon Genesis Evangelion“. Dude could cure cancer and it would still be the second line of his obituary after “the creator of Neon Genesis Evangelion died today”. That show, which ran from 1995 to 1996 started out as a pretty typical (if far more stylish than usual) “teens in mechs battling monsters” show before transitioning into an emotionally fraught exploration of adolescent psychology, mental health and abuse served with a heavy dose of surrealist imagery and Christian symbolism.

Plus, the robot battles were sick, brah.

Godzilla’s home studio, Toho, had put the franchise on hiatus with 2004’s Godzilla: Final Wars, but after the positive reception of Ken Watanabe saying “Let Them Fight”, Toho decided to bring back Godzilla to kickstart a new continuity for the character.

Now understand, if you’re a fan of the Godzilla series what I’m about to say isn’t meant as a criticism, more an observation. There are two basic types of Godzilla movie: Godzilla versus Humans and Godzilla versus Other Monsters. It’s a pretty limited schema, but credit where credit’s due, the creators of this series have managed to ring a fair bit of variety out of these two scenarios, particularly in terms of Godzilla’s character, which is doubly impressive when you remember we’re talking about a large non-verbal animal. Godzilla is something of a renaissance lizard, a Kaijiu for all seasons. In the original he was a very deliberate representation of Japan’s lingering trauma over the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as a response to the more recent deaths of the crew of Daigo Fukuryū Maru as a result of US nuclear testing in the Pacific. He’s also served as a metaphor for Japanese war guilt, a gentle Friend to All Children, a reluctant guardian of humanity, a vindictive destroyer and even just a big dumb lizard. After 30 films, you’d be forgiven for thinking there wasn’t really much else to do with the big lug. That’s probably why Anno got the nod to direct Shin Godzilla, given his success in putting a new spin on the seemingly tired giant mech genre.

How did it go? Shin Godzilla was a massive, and I do mean MASSIVE success in its home country, opening at number one and out-grossing the 2014 American Godzilla by almost a quarter and tripling the box office take of Godzilla: Final Wars, the previous Japanese installment. It also won Picture of the Year at the Japan Academy Awards, which is kinda like a new James Bond movie winning Best Picture.

This thing was huge in Japan, appropriately enough. In the West, though, the reaction has been a bit more mixed. Not bad, by any means, but there’s definitely a sense that this movie is not remotely interested in catering to Western sensibilities as to what this kind of movie should be. And that’s fair, this is most assuredly not your typical Godzilla movie, which is probably why the Western DVD release thought it necessary to put one of the most underwhelming review pulls I have ever seen on the cover:

“Of all the movies to feature Godzilla, this is certainly one of them.”

So let’s talk a little about  continuity in the Godzilla series. Godzilla is a lot like Halloween: a long running series with multiple sequels of wildly varying quality all emanating from one, unquestionable stone cold classic. And like Halloween, Godzilla has rebooted itself multiple times while leaving the canonicity of that one, original classic intact. Until now. Shin Godzilla is the first Godzilla movie where it is clear that the events of the 1954 movie never happened.

The movie opens with the Japanese coast guard coming across an abandoned pleasure boat, the Glory Maru, in Tokyo Bay. The coast guard search the ship but find no one. Suddenly, the boat is destroyed by a massive water spout and the Tokyo Aqua Line (an under-sea traffic corridor) begins to flood with water.

Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Rando Yaguchi rushes to the situation room where the Japanese government is monitoring the situation. So here’s as good a time as any to discuss what Anno’s fresh new take on Godzilla is and why it may not have gone down so well in the West. All through these early scenes I was waiting for Jeff Goldblum to arrive. You know, the one dude who saw the crisis coming and now has to show all these stupid, faceless bureaucrats what to do. I suppose you could argue that Yaguchi kinda fulfills this role to the extent that he’s the first one to suggest that it’s a living creature causing this crisis and everyone tells him to shut the hell up. But he quickly fades into the background and the one thing a Jeff Goldblum never, ever does is fade into the background.

What background could contain him, I ask you?

No, in this movie there is no one central hero. The hero of this Godzilla movie is the Japanese government. Those faceless bureaucrats are the heroes. Anno’s question is essentially; “But what would actually happen if a giant monster attacked Japan?” and the quite plausible answer would be “the government would have a shit ton of meetings, try desperately to cover its ass and basically improvise desperately on the fly until they somehow muddled their way out the other side”. This is why I find this movie so damned hard to recap, there are tons of characters and names and departments to keep track of. Frankly, if I never see another middle aged Japanese man in a suit looking pensively at a screen it will be too soon.

This is, like, 60% of the movie right here.

I’ve read reviews calling this satire but I don’t think that’s correct. I’ve also read reviews calling it a harsh critique of Japan’s government and I think that’s flat out wrong. The impression I get (and maybe this is just the civil servant in me) is that Anno is taking an unvarnished look at the unglamorous, laborious, decidedly un-sexy world of government and nonetheless finding nobility there. He looks at a regime in the midst of an unprecedented crisis and turns it into John McClane; bloodied, disheveled, terrified, in over its head and fighting to survive moment to moment, but also fundamentally good-hearted and ultimately even heroic. It’s certainly not a movie I’d recommend to a libertarian, but then I wouldn’t recommend any movie to a libertarian as I don’t break bread with their kind.

Anyway, while rescue teams work on evacuating people from the flooding tunnel, the Prime Minister and his cabinet try to figure out what the hell caused the disaster in the first place, reasoning that it must be a volcanic eruption or a thermal vent. Yaguchi pipes up that there is viral footage showing a massive creature emerging from the bay but he’s shot down because what ever is causing all the steam in the bay is

a) Frickin’ huge

b) Frickin’ hot

so barring a whale going through one hell of a menopause the causes are probably geological. After the meeting, Yaguchi’s boss, Hideki Akasaka, quietly reprimands him and reminds him who got him his job.

“Look, I know I didn’t SAY “If I give you this job I don’t want you to mention giant monsters in front of the PM” but you will admit it was implied?”

Anyway, footage soon surfaces of a massive frickin’ tail emerging from the water and thermal vents *checks notes* do not have those so it looks like Yaguchi’s crazy ass pull of a suggestion was actually correct. The government calls in some experts on aquatic life but none of them is actually willing to even admit that this is a giant animal in case it turns out to be a hoax. Yaguchi’s aide puts in a call to a girl he knows in the Department of the Environment named Ogashira so they finally have an expert who can analyse this thing without worrying about not getting tenure or whatever.

Ogashira (who I can best describe as “Japanese Aubrey Plaza”) notes that the creature has legs which means it can probably walk on land. But another minister tells the PM that they have it on good authority that the creature’s legs are weak and squishy and that it definitely will not leave the water. The Prime Minister, thinking that this is one of those Godzilla movies where Godzilla stays in the water and doesn’t bother nobody, gives a press conference saying that the creature absolutely, definitely, 100% will not come ashore.

Sad trombone noise.

I mentioned already that this is the first Godzilla movie that does not treat the events of the original film as canon. In this continuity, Godzilla never appeared in 1954, meaning that the Japanese government is completely at a loss as to what this thing even is let alone how to deal with it. There’s a reason for that. The original Godzilla, as already mentioned, was a very deliberate attempt to comment on the horror and destruction of the nuclear bombings (some sources state that this was to get around Allied censorship but the American occupation of Japan had already ended two years prior so I don’t think that’s the case). But yeah, next time you watch the original movie, pay attention to the shape of the monster’s head:

Likewise, the mottled hide of the beast is modelled after the keloid scars of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagaski. It’s very, very deliberate. So by setting its story in a new continuity, Shin Godzilla is finally breaking that link between Godzilla and Hiroshima/Nagaski. And it does this because, of course, there was another, almost as traumatic tragedy that had befallen Japan a mere five years before this movie was released.

This is actually still from the movie, and not from Fukushima. But would you have known if I hadn’t told you?

Just as Godzilla ’54 was about the carnage wrought by Little Boy and Fat Man, Shin Godzilla literalises the apocalyptic days of March 2011, when Japan was hit by the largest earthquake in its history, a subsequent tsunami and a Level 7 meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. And if you’re wondering how bad that is, just know that there is no such thing as a “Level 8” meltdown.

But enough build-up. It’s time to actually see this monster. And it is…well, it’s…

Hmmmmmm.

“HELLO!”

First of all, if you hate this, I don’t blame you. And I think if this was the Godzilla we got for the entire movie, Anno would have received a fan backlash that would have made the finale of Evangelion look like a day at the spa. But this Godzilla is kinda like a Pokémon; it has many forms that bigger and tougher looking as it evolves. So if you don’t like it, don’t worry, it’ll be gone soon. But personally, I really dig it. The slithering motion, those dead, staring eyes. It’s goofy but also really creepy, in a way that reminds me of the Titans from Attack on Titan. The absurdity of it makes it more nightmarish, it’s cool.

Then again, I actually think THIS design is awesome as hell so clearly my taste is highly suspect.

Anyway, the creature goes lolloping blindly through Tokyo, desperately scrambling over buildings and leaving a trail of destruction in its wake. Meanwhile the government is working to evacuate the city and trying to co-ordinate a defence in a country where they can’t even legally activate their own army unless they are being attacked by a foreign nation. There’s been a lot of hemming and hawing as to whether this movie is promoting Japanese militarism and nationalism and…you know what, I’m not qualified to answer that. I don’t speak Japanese, I’m not au fait enough with the current political climate in Japan, anything I say will just be ill-informed burbling so I’m not going to comment okay? I am keeping my fool mouth shut, for once.

Anyway, while the creature keeps evolving, we see the movie’s fascination with the minutiae of disaster response. How do we get these people out? Where can we send the evacuees? Do we distribute our defence evenly or focus on the economic and population hub of Kanto? What are the diplomatic repercussions of activating the army? And how is it done? Meetings, meetings and more meetings. In fact, Yaguichi is so disillusioned with all these meetings that he goes rogue and forms a crack team of scientists, bureaucrats and military to…have meetings with.

Ah, now we’re getting somewhere!

Yaguichi tells this group that they have been assembled because these are the freaks, outcasts, Cassandras and oddballs of the Japanese government and he’s brought them together because they get results, damn it! Now, in an American movie this would be the part where one nerd raises their hand, suggests a radical new idea and becomes our main character. But again, this movie purposefully eschews that kind of glamorising of the individual. The only heroism is collective. It honestly feels more like a Chinese science fiction film than a Japanese one and this absolute disinterest in individuals and absolute fascination with groups is at once weirdly compelling and alienating. I’m fascinated by this film, which is not quite the same as enjoying it.

Anyway, the team’s first question is “how the hell is this thing powering itself?”. Ogashira suggests that it uses nuclear fission.

Everyone thinks that’s crazy but, sure enough, radiation levels start rising all over Tokyo. Because you can’t so much as whisper the word “nuclear” without Uncle Sam getting all up in your bidniss, the US president insists on sending a representative to join the Japanese efforts. He sends Kayoco Anne Patterson, a third generation Japanese American diplomat who has aspirations to the US presidency which will be rather difficult considering she speaks English like a character in a Twin Peaks dream sequence.

“Okay. Mean.”

Sorry, sorry. I don’t mean to be an asshole, especially since Satomi Ishihara apparently found the English dialogue incredibly frustrating. Her performance is very good overall but, yeah, her English is pretty much unintelligible. I do really like this character though. Like, she’s representing the US State Department and she shows up to her meeting with her opposite number in the Japanese government wearing a leather jacket.

Oh, these American women. They don’t let anyone tell them what to do!

Like, I’m amazed they didn’t just have her crash through the wall on a Harley while smoking a cigarette and disrespecting her elders. It’s hilarious. Patterson gives the Japanese a lead on a scientist named Goro Maki, who left Japan several decades ago and was working for the US Department of Energy. Maki theorised that there was a big fuck-off lizard on the bottom of the ocean feeding on nuclear waste and mutating to a massive size. Maki was originally from Odo Island (the island where Godzilla first appeared in the 1954 film) and named the monster after a local deity; Godzilla. Yaguichi notes that the name, rendered in kanji, is “Gojira” and that means it’s time for FUN WITH LINGUISTICS!

So it’s a common myth that the character’s “correct” name is “Gojira” and that “Godzilla” is just what the ignorant gaijin call him. In fact, it was Toho who proposed the transliteration of ゴジラas “Godzilla” and not “Gojira” when the original movie was released in the West. The confusion comes from the fact that in Japanese there is no different between the two names. It’s a phonetic distinction that’s audible to native English speakers but not native Japanese speakers. Watch the original film (and this one) and you’ll hear people using both interchangeably because to them it’s the same word.

Godzilla/Gojira has retreated back into the water and Yaguichi’s team theorise that it needs to cool down like a nuclear reactor and that this might be the key to destroying it. The next morning the monster returns and this time…ho-boy…

Now fully bipedal, and more than double its previous size this is the largest Godzilla ever depicted in a life action movie. It’s also probably the creepiest. It feels less like a living creature and more like a huge, sky-scraper tall zombie, a mountain of rotting cadaverous flesh powering forward on residual instinct.

The Prime Minister decides that he’s put up with all that he’s going to put up with in an election year and orders full military countermeasures. The SDF attacks Godzilla with every weapon at their disposal; machine guns, tank artillary, aerial bombardment, social opprobrium, you name it. None of it works, Godzilla just takes everything they throw at him and says “thank you sir, may I have another?”

The PM is advised to request American assistance, only to then be told by the American ambassador that USAF planes are already en route whether he likes it or not. The government then lurches into a face-saving press conference to claim that they requested America’s assistance in the first place. This movie drew some flack for being “anti-American” from American fans but I don’t think that’s exactly the case. It’s definitely critical of what it sees as Japan’s overly deferential relationship with the US. But on the other hand, various characters express admiration for the US not being beholden to an ossified gerontocracy, valuing talent over experience and actually being able to get shit done. Even when the US makes the decision later in the film to nuke Japan for the third time, it’s never implied that they’re doing it out of malice or that they’re not aware of how deeply traumatic that would be for the Japanese people. It’s because they’re out of options and this Godzilla is a threat to all life on Earth.

While the US attack is pending, the Prime Minister and Yaguichi’s team are forced to evacuate from Gozilla’s path. And again, this movie’s obsession with process comes to the fore. Where do we relocate the government to? Who will be in charge while the PM is in transit? This may be the first Godzilla movie where the fact that traffic would just be a nightmare in the middle of a kaijiu attack is actually a plot point.

The American planes hit Godzilla with a couple of bunker buster which actually cause him to bleed. And Godzilla’s all…

…and pukes atomic fire all over Tokyo.

The fire breathing scene also reveals two really cool little details of this creature’s design. Firstly, his mouth unhinges like a python and secondly, before he unleashes his atomic breath a second eyelid snaps over his eyes to stop him being blinded. It’s neat.

The next morning, Yaguichi is distraught to learn that the Prime Minister and a majority of the cabinet has been killed. The acting Prime Minister is a man named Satomi, a party hack who apparently got the job based on party loyalty and not any suitability for the role. And when we see Satomi, he clearly has a lot of problems on his plate.

Man, it is hard at the top.

A group of American scientists arrive to help Yaguichi’s team. At the moment, Godzilla is all tuckered out and in a state of hibernation. However, when the team analyse Godzilla’s DNA they realise that Godzilla can reproduce asexually and mutate into new, smaller forms that can cross oceans whereupon the Americans abruptly leave saying “sorry, be right back, we just gotta tell our boss the bad nukes…news! News! The bad news.”

The UN gives Japan an ultimatum: get its Godzilla shit together, get all its Godzilla shit together, get it all together and put it in a back pack, all their Godzilla shit, so it’s together and if they don’t get their Godzilla shit together in two days, the US will see how many times you can  nuke a country without voiding the warranty.

Everyone is furious and horrified at the idea of Japan suffering another nuclear attack and Ogashira solemnly intones that “man is more terrifying that Gojira” which…

…no.

So now it’s a race against the clock. Fortunately, Yaguichi’s team crack Goro Maki’s research and they come up with a plan, to use chemical coagulants to freeze its blood. They need international help to get enough coagulant and the movie has one very short scene that goes out of its way to show the Germans being super helpful.

Aw, how nice. The Germans and the Japanese, helping each other. Just two good pals. Best of buds. Best friends in the whooooole world. Isn’t that so nice?

That’s nice.

While the American military forces Godzilla to use its atomic breath and expend energy, the Japanese use high powered trains to knock the creature off its feet and then shove great big wodges of coagulant into his open mouth while he’s still recharging.

It seems like it hasn’t worked when Godzilla rises to his feet again, but then he suddenly flashes freezes solid. The nuclear attack is called off, with the nations of the world warning Japan that if Godzilla so much as moves his big toe they are going to nuke the shit out of him.

Yaguichi is congratulated by his boss and told that he has a bright future in government ahead of him. And the last shot of the movie is a close up of the tip of Godzilla’s tale, which seems to be sprouting weird…humanoid…things…

***

I won’t say Shin Godzilla converted me to the Godzilla fandom but it did make me appreciate that the franchise is more versatile and interesting than I’d been giving it credit for. If you’re a fan of Hideaki Anno I’d definitely recommend it; it feels very like Neon Genesis in music, sound design and cinematography. If you like big monster action, it’ll certainly scratch that itch too. And while it wasn’t really my bad, I found a lot to like in this rare film where the faceless bureaucrats who do the thankless job of keeping society running finally get their due.

I doubt there has ever been a movie that made the drudgery of meetings and paper pushing seems as weirdly noble as this one. And in a time when the institutions of government have been put under pressure like never before and have still, somehow, kept trundling on, I think that’s worth celebrating.

Next update: 11 April 2021

Next time: So did this Anno guy do anything else?*

* So I know I previously said I’d be reviewing Evangelion 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone but it’s not streaming anywhere I can find and the DVDs are crazy expensive so we’re doing this one. 

***

My book, When the Sparrow falls, is now available for preorder! Links here.

Publishers Weekly Review!

Woke up today to learn that there was a review of When the Sparrow Falls on Publisher’s Weekly!

“Any good?”

“Only if you believe the BIBLE OF MY INDUSTRY.”

“Sharpson’s provocative debut, adapted from his play The Caspian Sea, takes readers to the early 23rd-century Caspian Republic, an authoritarian nation-state reminiscent of Cold War–era Eastern Europe, where the remnants of pure humanity hold out against an artificial intelligence-controlled world. When a popular Caspian journalist dies and is discovered to have been an AI in disguise, his estranged AI wife, Lily, is dispatched from the outside world to identify the body. Nikolai South, a long-serving, unambitious State Security agent for the Republic is assigned as Lily’s liaison, only to be rocked by her uncanny resemblance to his own late wife. During their time together, South must determine if Lily is involved in a plan to smuggle digitally converted human consciousnesses out of the Republic—and along the way, he becomes caught between warring intelligence agencies and learns dark truths about the Republic’s origins. Sharpson skillfully evokes an atmosphere of paranoia, duplicity, and secrecy, while using the conflict between humans and AIs to probe themes of self-awareness, identity, and memory. As Sharpson pushes the narrative beyond South’s present and into an increasingly messy future, he showcases the untenable nature of the Caspian Republic and its corrupt framework. The result is a thoughtful sci-fi thriller that skillfully blends a retro spy aesthetic with future technology.”

“Nobody cares, when are you reviewing Raya?”

“When Disney + stops asking for my bone marrow in payment.”

“Beneath this mask there is an idea, Mr. Creedy. And ideas are bulletproof.”

Alan Moore. I honestly doubt whether there is a single writer for whom the gap is wider between the strength of their work and the quality of the adaptations based on that work. If I read you off Moore’s bibliography it forms a perfectly acceptable list of greatest comics of all time:

Watchmen, From Hell, The Killing Joke, League of Extraordinary Gentleman.

I read you the list of the corresponding adaptations (for movies at least):

Watchmen, From Hell, The Killing Joke, LXG

and you start looking for the fire extinguisher to put out this garbage fire. There is a reason why Alan Moore refuses to even be credited on works based on his comics and it’s not because he is now just a beard suspended in mid-air by a floating energy field of old man cussedness. He has been done dirty by Hollywood like few writers before him. But, amid all the terrible adaptations there is of course one exception. Or is there?

“Verily”.

Or maybe not. Sorry, I’m vascillating. Here’s what I find fascinating about V for Vendetta. It is, was, and probably will remain an incredibly divisive film and that is so much rarer than it used to be. In the pre-internet days, film criticism was the domain of a relative handful of newspaper and TV film critics. The masses would vote with their wallets, but their actual opinion on any given movie was largely silent. No one was taking big polls of thousands or millions of ordinary movie-goers to gauge their opinions on a given film. That was left to the critics who would often disagree wildly with each other on the merits of any one work.

Nowadays, of course, everyone is a film critic. Everyone writes about film, whether it’s on Twitter or Rotten Tomatoes or Facebook or or any of the million and one new social media platforms that are just sprouting up everywhere like little markers on my path to the grave.

“Hi there.”

“Fuck off.”

You would think that this would mean an even greater diversity of opinions on every single film but on the contrary, the opposite tends to happen. Consensus usually builds around a film very rapidly. Either it’s universally acclaimed, universally pilloried or (if it’s anything remotely political) it gets stripped for parts in the never-ending culture war with two camps forming who will defend it to the death regardless of its merits or flaws as long as it triggers the libs/smashes the whitecispatriarchy.

This, you will probably not be surprised to learn, is not a conducive enviroment for insightful, nuanced film critique. So what I really appreciate about V for Vendetta is that it’s a rare film in that it does actually provoke a very diverse range of responses from people. Opinions on it run the full gamut from Travesty to “Capital G” Great Film.

I’m pretty sure most people would agree that it is the best Alan Moore cinematic adaptation, but after that consensus ends. I’m going to keep my opinion on the film to myself until the end (largely because at the time of writing I’m still trying to figure out that very thing). But regardless of its quality it is an absolutely fascinating film to discuss and I’m looking forward to it tremendously.

So, little background.

V for Vendetta began life in the British comics anthology series Warrior in 1982. Written by Moore and illustrated by David Lloyd, it’s one of Moore’s earlier works and was begun when he was only 29. My edition of V for Vendetta has a forward by Moore where he humbly begs the reader’s forbearance for the immaturity of the early chapters which I rolled my eyes at. It is, right out the gate, an extremely mature, gripping, literate and intelligently written comic and what’s more Alan Moore fucking knows it.

Set in 1992…

It depicts a Britain where society collapsed after a nuclear war in the 1980s that devastated most of the world. The Nordic Supremacist Norsefire party seized control in the chaos and enacted their own version of the Final Solution on anyone who wasn’t on the Daily Mail’s subscription list. The story follows a large cast of characters over many years (some party members, some not, some victims, some villains) as a masked figure known only as “V” spreads anarchy and slowly brings the whole rotting edifice of Norsefire Britain crashing down. It’s a thumping good read, and I whole-heartedly recommend it even if I’m not quite on board with its political argument. Moore presents anarchy as fascism’s antithesis and antidote whereas I tend to view it as its preamble. But when I say I disagree with the book, I mean I can envision having a long and deeply fascinating debate with someone in a pub over it, not that I want to scream in all caps over a message board.

It is also, it must be said, a rather dated book in many ways. It’s clearly and explicitly a critique of Thatcher’s Britain and its POV character, Evey, is far more passive and damsel-esque (at least in the early chapters) than you would expect these days. And Moore himself noted in his introduction to the collected volume that his premise that

a) A global nuclear war would be in anyway survivable and

b) That it would take something that dramatic to bring fascism to a modern Western nation

was adorably naive. This actually happens a lot with old science fiction. See also Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep where Philip K. Dick suggested that it would take a nuclear holocaust to cause the mass extinction of most animal life on Earth instead of humanity just….y’know…truckin’ along.

Anyway, the rights to the book were acquired by Joel Silver all the way back in 1988 but it only began production in the early 2000s. The movie shares a lot of lineage with the Matrix Trilogy, with Silver producing, the Wachowskis’ scripting and Hugo Weaving starring in the title role.

If V is so head and shoulders above the rest of the adaptations of Moore’s work it’s because the creators had a definite artistic motive greater than ringing a few million dollars out of a viable property. Just as Moore originally wrote the comic as a reaction to Thatcherism, the Wachowski’s wrote their screenplay as a response to the second Bush administration, a time when corrupt, ruthless, authoritarian right-wingers still had a little class and dignity.

Good times.

 

So the movie is set in the 2020s…

…but opens in the 17th century with Evey Hammond (Natalie Portman) relating the story of Guy “Last Man to enter Parliament with Honest Intentions” Fawkes in voiceover. This opening scene neatly displays two of the movie’s biggest problems from the get go. Firstly, the Wachowski’s have a weird “early George Lucas” quality to their dialogue. What I mean is, they’re capable of lines that are genuinely iconic but often they write dialogue that’s perfectly comprehensible but just…slightly…off.

Take this, for example:

“I know his name was Guy Fawkes and I know, in 1605, he attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament. But who was he really? What was he like?”

I mean, I know “what was he like?” means, “what was this historical icon actually like as a human being?” but it just doesn’t quite have the right associations. I hear “what was he like?” I picture a teenaged girl lying on her bed, talking to her BFF about last night’s date with that bad boy who just started in school.

“What?! He tried to blow up parliament as a prelude to restoring a Catholic monarchy in England? OMG that is so HOT.”

Second problem, and this is one we can’t blame on George Lucas this time: Natalie Portman is kinda terrible in this. In fact, I’m pretty sure early 2000s Natalie Portman was just not a very good actor period. I mean, nobody noticed in the Star Wars prequels because outside of Ewan McGregor, Ian McDiarmid, Christopher Lee and a few of the muppets nobody came out of those trashfires with their acting credentials burnished. But here….yeah, she’s just really bad and I’m pretty sure it’s the accent. She’s trying so hard, you can literally see her forcing the muscles of her mouth to form the words like the voice coach taught her and it’s just not happening and she obviously knows it. It’s a stiff, uncomfortable performance from an actor with enough savvy to know that what she’s doing isn’t working but it’s too late now to fix it.

Anyway, Evey Hammond is not, like her book counterpart, a teenaged prostitute, but a low level employee in BTN, the state broadcaster of Norsefire Britain and your thinly veiled Fox News allegory for the evening. Which is ridiculous, of course, to even suggest that English people would ever tolerate something as crass as Fox News on their screens.

The Great British public get their vile racist screeds and jingoistic propaganda in print form. They are not SAVAGES.

When we first see her she’s getting made up to go out while on the TV in the background, Lewis Prothero (“The Voice of London”) is closing out his show with a light fascist rant. And God bless Roger Allam, an always game performer who’s carved out a fine career as a professional English Bastard but even he can’t save one of the clunkiest bits of expository dialogue I can remember hearing in a long time. He doesn’t quite say “Just a reminder, we hate America because as you all know they unleashed a biological weapon that devastated most of the world and that’s why we had to kill all the Jews, Muslims, Gays and Socialists and create this awesome fascist dystopia that you, the viewer, have been living in for the last twenty years or so and now here’s Linda with the fascist weather” but it’s borderline, guys. Anyway, Evey turns this off in disgust so we know that she’s one of the good ones but that just raises the question as to why she was listening to it in the first place (maybe he had a really good musical guest?). She heads out into the night despite the fact that there’s a curfew.

Now, while I did just drop some pretty heavy shade on this movie’s world-building, I’m actually going to do an about face and admit that there are some ways in which the movie’s depiction of Norsefire Britain is arguably stronger than the novel’s. The novel’s depiction of England under NF is like Orwell’s Oceania crossed with Thatcher’s Britain. Brutal, impoverished, bleak and unmistakably a fascist, totalitarian state. Where I think the movie is perhaps a little bit savvier is that it shows a Norsefire Britain that is in many ways…normal. There are lots of scenes of families sitting down around the TV, office workers going about their day, ordinary people having a pint in the pub. Just normal, day to day life. Which, honestly, I find a lot scarier. It feels normal because, for these people, it is normal. The fascists won. And this is normal now. And for the majority of people, the lucky ones, the ones who look like the ones in charge. It’s fine. It’s all fine.

Anyway, Evey gets accosted by two “Fingermen”, basically the Gestapo. For explanation, the comic had this conceit where the different departments of Norsefire’s Government were named after different body parts (the state police are “The Finger”, the regular cops as “The Nose”, Broadcasting as “The Mouth” etc). The movie mostly dispenses with that, except for this one stray reference to Fingermen. Anyway, Evey almost gets raped by the Fingermen but is saved by the valorous visitation of a vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of Fate, his visage, no mere veneer of vanity, a vestige of the vacant, vanquished vox populi, a by-gone vivified vexation who has vowed to vanquish the venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition.

“Vagina!”

So, I’ll say this if you’re doing an adaptation of V for Vendetta: get V right, and that’s half the shooting match. And fair’s fair, they fucking got V right, at least in terms of visual presentation and performance.

Hugo Weaving plays the part like Hamlet; vascillating violently (I’ll stop now) between whimsical lunacy and steely menace. And, fuck but if this isn’t the most perfect visual translation of a comic book character to film we’d seen up until that point I don’t know what is. Pretty much perfect.

V invites Evey up the roof and, because it’s usually considered ill-mannered to refuse a request from a man still wiping your attempted rapist’s giblets from his cummerbund, she agrees. From a high vantage point, Evey watches in horror as V blows up the Old Bailey to the strains of the Tchaikovsk’s 1812 Overture (guess she’s more of a Beethoven gal).

We cut to Norsefire Party headquarters where the leaders of the regime are being berated by John Hurt’s massive head looming over them like frickin’ Zordon.

The Chancellor, Suttler, instructs the various department heads as to how they’re going to spin the Old Bailey’s bombing as a scheduled demolition. He then asks Inspector Finch (Stephen Rhea) how close they are to catching the culprit. This is something that didn’t make much sense in the comic, and makes even less sense here.

In the comic, Finch is the head of the Nose, so essentially the Commissioner of the Met. However, in the comic he’s shown doing a lot of hands on investigating that seems way below his pay grade. But the movie has the opposite problem. Here, Finch is just an inspector. So him being down at the coalface tracking down V personally makes perfect sense, but scenes like these where he’s essentially in a COBRA meeting being chewed out by the Prime Minister which seems way ABOVE his pay grade. Anyway, Finch is our one good cop trying to hold on to his soul in a future totalitarian dystopia and I don’t know about you but that’s a premise I can’t get enough of!

The next day at work, Evey Hammon visits the office of the talk show host Gordon Dietrich (Stephen Fry), whose home she was trying to reach when she was attacked by the Fingermen. Dietrich tells her that, what with the curfew getting even more stringent, they’ll have to postpone their assignation for the time being.

“Damnable nuisance, I was rather looking forward to penetrating you vaginally.”

Finch and his partner Stone (Rupert Graves), identify Evey from some CCTV footage and race over to BTN to arrest her. By a rather spectacular bit of timing, that’s exactly the time when V attacks the station and broadcasts a message to all of Britain inviting them to meet him outside of the Houses of Parliament next November 5th to watch him finish what Guy Fawkes started.

This speech of V’s is incredibly important in both versions of the story and they are substantially different in each. So, if you’ll indulge me, take a minute to read the original.

And this is the same scene in the movie:

See the difference? One is a warm, spirited “JOIN ME, COMPADRES!” call to revolution, and the other is a supervillain monologue. One is exculpatory, even forgiving, and the other accuses the audience of complicity and threatens them with retribution. Movie V presents himself as one of the people, here to lead them to liberation. But Comic V presents himself as this society’s nemesis; all their sins coming home to roost. And I think this is the movie’s greatest deficiency compared to the comic: the Wachowskis think V is a superhero. An avenging Batman. When in reality, the comic book character he most resembles is…

I don’t make that comparison lightly, by the way. There’s a scene in the comic where Prothero wakes up in the abandoned ruins of the concentration camp he used to run and is greeted with this:

Feel familiar? Let me give you a hint.

Of course, Moore is not entirely innocent of glorifiying V. He understands that V is sexy and cool and badass and funny and that it is profoundly satisfying to watch him cut up fascists like pizza toppings. But I don’t think he ever forgets that “V” stands for “villain”. And I think the Wachowskis do.

After the broadcast, V is almost shot by Stone and rescued at the last minute by Evey, who is in turn knocked unconscious by Stone. Unwilling to leave Evey for the police, V takes her with him to his secret lair beneath London.

When she regains consciousness she awakens to find herself in V’s home which is a combination Batcave and museum to everything that Norsefire has banned. Ms. Mouse actually pointed out something that I’d never noticed before but couldn’t stop once she did: the editing is a big pile of pooh.

There’s a scene of Evey just quietly walking down a hallway but it’s edited as frenetically as the lobby shootout in the Matrix. It’s like they’re afraid we’ll fall asleep if they don’t trigger an epileptic seizure every five minutes. V tells her that he can’t let her go as she knows the colour of the stone walls which would be enough for a clever man to deduce the location of his hideout and that she’ll have to stay for a year until he’s pulled off his attack on parliament. At first she’s furious but calms down after some breakfast.

V quotes Macbeth and Evey says that her mother used to read Shakespeare’s plays to her when she was a little girl and that’s why she always wanted to be an actor an aaaaargh God I hate this trope. Like, really? She read Shakespeare to you? How exactly? Did she read out the identifiers? And the stage directions? Do different voices for all of the characters? Because that is not a fun way to experience Shakespeare. You either read it or you see it staged but one person reading the script does not fucking work.

Anyway, Evey asks if V meant what he said in the broadcast and points out that anyone who actually shows up on November Fifth will be killed by Creedy, the head of the secret police. V gives the famous line that “people should not be afraid of their governments, governments, should be afraid of their people”.

“Yeah but…they’re not?”

“What?! OH JESUS THEY’LL BE KILLED!!”

Evey asks if he thinks blowing up a building will really make a difference and V replies that blowing up a building can change the world…and sorry, this was four years after 9/11 and I don’t care what the Wachowskis thought they were saying about the Bush administration. 3,000 people were murdered. If this was unintentional it was tone-deaf as all hell. If it was intentional, if we’re really supposed to see V as Osama bin Laden and cheer him on then that’s fucking despicable.

V shows Evey an old movie, the Count of Monte Cristo. This is a change from the book, where it was V reading Evey Enid Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree which was rather creepily infantilizing so I’m glad they nixed it. After the movie, they watch the news and Evey is horrified to learn that Prothero is dead. V calmly reveals that he murdered him using Evey’s work ID to gain access.

Meanwhile, Finch and Stone investigate Prothero’s murder and discover that he was formerly the commandant of a “resettlement” camp called Larkhill. Finch tries to find records on Larkhill but is quickly warned off by Creedy. Finch starts tracking down old staff from Larkhill. He learns that the camp chaplain, Anthony Lilliman, is now the Bishop of London.

Evey approaches V and tells him that she wants to help him in his mission. V dresses her as an underage prostitute and uses her to entrap Lilliman who…ahem, lives on the moon as they say.

The movie makes two changes to Evey’s character here, one to the good and one to the bad. Evey in the book freaks out and turns against V only when she sees him kill Lilliman because apparently she thought he was going to give him a stern lecture and send him on his way. Evey in the movie, on the other hand, pretends to go along with V’s plan but is actually lying so that she can escape. That gives her more agency while also making her seem like a more rational, pragmatic character. The problem is, she tries to escape by approaching, of all people, Lilliman and asking for his help to escape V.

Well, if you can’t trust a fascist paedophile, who can you trust?

When he proves less than non-rapey, V arrives and kills him and Evey flees, finally ending up at the home of Dietrich who agrees to hide her.

Finch visits the pathologist, Delia Surridge (played by Sinead Cusack), for the results of Lilliman’s autopsy and gives her a rose that V left at the scene of the crime. When he returns to the office he discovers that Surridge was the doctor at Larkhill and races to her home before V can get to her.

One of the reasons why I find V for Vendetta so maddeningly difficult to form an opinion on is that for a lot if it’s run time it’s quite bad except for scenes like this which are pretty much perfect. It’s also quite telling that the very strongest scenes are the ones lifted almost word for word from the original comic. That might sound like a back-handed compliment but it’s not. It’s actually damn hard to just take a comic and make it work as film. Watchmen is scrupulously faithful to the original comic in its dialogue and plot but is (for me at least) fucking unwatchable because anyone can recite Shakespeare but not everyone cam actually understand what they’re saying when they do.

So hat’s off to the Wachowskis and director James McTeigue, this scene where V kills Deliah Surridge while also granting her absolution is done about as well as it could be done. Of course, it helps that this scene has two of the strongest performers in the whole cast (Weaving and Cusack) and none of its weak links. Cusack in particular is wonderful here. I absolutely love this exchange between her and V:

“Is it meaningless to apologise?”

“Never.”

Alone among V’s victims, she is granted a painless death.

At Dietrich’s home he takes her into his confidence and reveals that he’s actually gay and has a secret trove of forbidden contraband like a Quran, gay erotica and several copies of 1001 reasons why the Norsefire Party are a Shower of Wankers. Dietrich tells her sadly than when you wear a mask long enough it becomes who you are which has led some fans to speculate that Dietrich actually is V which is a real neat theory except that:

We see Dietrich in BTN during V’s rampage.Dietrich has no visible burns.The only way Dietrich could be V is if Creedy was working with him and staged his arrest later on.Look, I don’t want to body shame Stephen Fry but…maybe he should try being Stephen Salad if he wants to be a superhero?

Anyway, Dietrich has been feeling his oats because he broadcasts an episode of his show ripping the piss out of Chancellor Suttler and valorising V. Dietrich assumes that he’s famous enough to escape any consequences but it turns out that his caché just isn’t the same since Sandi Toksvig took over his old show.

Evey watches in horror as Dietrich is beaten and dragged out of his house by Creedy’s men. She tries to escape but is snatched off the street.

And here, Evey Hammond’s troubles begin.

This sequence, again, is lifted almost verbatim from the comic and, again, the leap in quality from the material surrounding it is quite jarring. Firstly, Portman has almost no dialogue and the difference this makes to her performance is stunning. Freed from trying to lip-wrestle with that ungodly pseudo-London twang she now does all her acting with her face and body and she is simply excellent. Evey is shaved, tortured, starved and interrogated for V’s whereabouts over and over again.

She is confined to a tiny bare cell with only a rat for company. In a rare bit of black comedy, when her food arrives in a tin bowl pushed through the door, the rat sniffs it and refuses to eat it. In her cell, Evey finds a message written on toilet paper. It’s from a woman named Valerie who relates her story to Evey. It begins with Valerie watching the rain in class, noting that her grandmother used to say that “God was in the rain” (I’ll get back to that). In school, she realised that she was gay and as an adult she met and fell in love with an actress named Ruth. They had three blissful years together until the rise of Norsefire. Valerie ends her letter saying:

“It seems strange that my life should end in such a terrible place, but for three years I had roses and apologised to no-one. I shall die here. Every inch of me shall perish. Every inch but one. An inch – it is small and it is fragile, and it is the only thing in the world worth having. We must never lose it or give it away. We must never let them take it from us. I hope that, whoever you are, you escape this place. I hope that the world turns and that things get better. But what I hope most of all is that you understand what I mean when I tell you that even though I do not know you, and even though I may never meet you, laugh with you, cry with you, or kiss you, I love you. With all my heart, I love you. Valerie.”

Evey is taken to be interrogated one final time and is told that if she does not comply, she will be taken behind the chemical sheds and shot. She chooses the sheds.

She is then told that she is now completely free and the door is left open for her.

Stunned, bruised and emaciated, Evey staggers out into the corridor and finds:

“Surprise!”

Yup. It was all V. V took Evey and subjected her to the same regime of torture and abuse he experienced in Larkhill, in order to make her see the world the way he does.

And this is the big problem with treating V like a hero. You get a scene where, essentially, the Joker has just created Harley Quinn…and we’re supposed to cheer. Evey is, at first, horrified and furious, and calls V a monster, but then he takes her up to the roof so she can stand in the rain and it’s intercut with scenes of V emerging from the flames of Larkhill after he destroyed the camp, a baptism of water contrasted with his baptism of fire. And Evey says “God is in the rain.”

So…about that line.

I’ve recently finished Ian Kershaw’s phenomenal biography of Hitler which I can’t praise enough. Two of the things I learned from that book were:

The depth of Hitler’s antipathy to the German churches and his ultimate plan for their dissolution.The degree of Christian (particularly Catholic) resistance to Nazi rule in Germany whether non-violent (the White Rose) or militant (the Stauffenberg Plot).

I bring this up because V for Vendetta (the comic) presents a, shall we say, less than flattering depiction of Christianity and shows it as being deeply complicit in Norsefire’s regime. And if the Wachowskis had wanted to at least give a little nuance to that depiction, and give some signs that there was some Norsefire equivalent of the White Rose acting in opposition to the state-sanctioned church, I would absolutely have welcomed that. But the “God is in the rain” line, which is not in the original comic, just feels like limp, zero-effort ass-covering. It reeks of “studio note for the rubes in flyover country” and honestly I’d rather it wasn’t there at all.

Evey decides that she can’t stay with V after all that and she leaves him. V is heartbroken.

“Why?! What did I do?!”

Finch meets “William Rookwood” a mysterious figure who offers to just fill him in on the backstory because we’re getting on to the final act and Finch hasn’t really made much progress. It’s a pity, this scene is actually a rather effective bit of montage and I dig it except the backstory it lays out is completely at odds with what we’ve already learned about this world’s lore. Rookwood’s story is this:

Larkhill was a medical research centre set up by “Suttler’s party”. Which party that is is not stated. We see Suttler speaking at a Norsefire rally but Rookwood also calls him a “Conservative” politician so maybe he was a Tory at the time? Or maybe it’s just “small c” conservative. Anyway. Before Larkhill is destroyed by V, they are able to extract a viral agent from V that they turn into a biological weapon.Creedy suggests unleashing this biological weapon on the British public under the guise of an Islamic terrorist attack. In the ensuing panic, Norsefire sweeps to power and turns Britain into a fascist state.

What’s the problem? Well, as an origin story for how Britain succumbed to fascism it requires that even before Norsefire seized power they were already operating concentration camps with the support of the military and rounding up gays, socialists, non-whites and Muslims (as we saw in Valerie’s testament). Got that? Britain became fascist when the fascist party that was already apparently running the country...took control of the country. In which case why bother with a strategy as insanely risky as virus-bombing your own population?

Oh, by the way, here’s a real sobering gutcheck: The terrifying death toll that triggers the total collapse of British democracy and terrified the people to the point that they voted in an obvious dictator?

At time of writing, the UK Covid death toll is 109,000 and rising.

Man. The past really is a foreign country, isn’t it?

As November 5th comes closer, Suttler becomes more and more unhinged, ordering ever tighter crackdowns on the citizenry. V posts thousands upon thousands of Guy Fawkes masks and cloaks across the country…

“How?”

“Fuck you, that’s how.”

V approaches Creedy and offers him a deal: V in exchange for Suttler. Creedy, who is smart enough to realise that he’s being fitted for a noose if he fails to stop V, agrees.

They meet in an abandoned subway station and make the trade. Creedy executes Suttler and orders his men to shoot V. V kills them all and Creedy and, fatally wounded, lips back to his lair.

He finds Evey there and, before he dies, shows her a subway train loaded down with explosives that will go all the way down to Westminster (after changing at Hammersmith, obviously) and asks her to finish what he started. V dies and Evey prepares his Viking funeral.

On the surface, crowds of people dressed as V have converged on Westminster but the soldiers guarding it, getting no orders from either Suttler or Creedy, decide to let them pass.

Finch arrives at the subway station and tries to stop Evey but she stares him down and Finch realises that…fuck it, what is he even trying to save at this point? He lowers his weapon, and Evey pulls the lever, setting the train on its way.

Evey and Finch head up to the surface to see what kind of damage a few tons of explosives and an Oyster card can do.

Finch asks Evey who V really was and Evey replies:

“He was all of us.”

***

V for Vendetta, the movie, is like pretty much anyone on Twitter under the age of 25. You can’t help but admire their passion and their honest to God burning desire for the world to be a better, fairer place. At the same time, at least half the stuff they’re coming out with is stupid as all hell. This movie is…it’s something. It veers wildly in tone, in quality, in everything. In that sense it’s much like it’s main character; both victim and villain, impossible to unmask, impossible to pin down. I can’t say it’s a great film, honestly I’m not even sure it’s a good one. But it’s got heart. And it’s got some real lovely moments. And I’m real glad it exists.

Our Verified, Vivified Version: 16/25

Scoring the quality of the adaptation is tricky. Some of the changes, particularly to Evey, were very much for the better. But I can’t deny the comic is a much better comic than the movie is a movie. But! The Wachowskis actually took this text and tried to tell their own story with it, animated by their own concerns and with their own message. If nothing else, that’s more laudable than the robotic, lifeless accuracy of something like Watchmen. It’s a “B” for effort, but a B is still a B.

Our Valourous Valiant Virtuouso: 18/25

Visually, vocally, very verisimilitudinous. But the Wachowskis and James McTeigue fall into the trap of treating V like a conventional superhero and not…y’know, a brutal terrorist who murders ruthlessy and uses people as pawns in his quest for (admittedly well deserved) vengeance.

Our Venomous, Venal Villains: 17/25

Fun as it is to see John Hurt graduate from Winston Smith to Big Brother, his Suttler is honestly a little lacking in menace and comes across as an impotent, panicked cypher. Much better is Tim Piggott-Smith’s odious, reptilian Creedy.

Our Vacant, Vacous Vox Populi: 15/25

Real mixed bag with the supporting characters. Portman is terrible except when she’s excellent (said it was a mixed bag). Rhea is honestly kinda phoning it in. Stephen Fry is always too arch for me to take him seriously in a dramatic role but he does get some nice moments here and there. And Sinead Cusack just eats everyone’s pie.

Verdict: 66%

NEXT UPDATE: St Mary’s, I mean Covid, isn’t letting up so…yeah. 11 March 2021. Sorry guys.

NEXT TIME: You know, I’m not normally a Kaijiu movie kinda mouse but I’ve been watching the “Kong versus Godzilla” trailer on repeat for days so, screw it, let’s watch some Japanese skyscrapers get theirs.

My novel, When then Sparrow Falls is now available to pre-order!