MonsterHunter

I suppose there’s a reality where a movie featuring an evil floating brain named Glyptofane Sex who is intent on preventing Earth from being re-seeded with human life isn’t just an example of the “let’s use a floating brain as a bad guy just because floating brains are intrinsically evil” school of filmmaking.

I’m also going to go out on a limb and hazard a guess that there might be a circumstance where having the fourteen year-old heroine of your movie dubbed by a male on the English language track who somehow manages to sound like a retarded toddler with a criminally cloying voice actually serves the plot and/or character development of the piece.

But is there really any excuse beyond thinking it would look “cool” for the maniac brain to somehow transform into a maniac caterpillar during the movie’s climax? Wasn’t the chief asset of the bad guy that he was a floating brain? And turning himself into a big worm was the only way he could come up with to defeat the good guys?

Artsmagic again gamely attempts to bring us some quality computer animation from Japan, but comes up short in this effort as it did in previous ones (Malice@Doll and A.LI.CE). It’s pretty much the same old complaint with Blue Remains as with the other two: while a great deal of time and skill clearly went into creating the look and animating the projects, everything else got chucked out the window like so many evil floating brains turned into giant worms that ended up dead because of some life-giving ray from a bunch of bean seeds.

While not as patently ridiculous as the “post-apocalyptic Earth inhabited solely by robot hookers” idea of Malice@Doll or as conceptually clunky as the time travel in Lapland plot that propelled A.LI.CE and its questionable punctuation along, Blue Remains takes an appealing idea and drowns it in a bunch of confusing and half-realized elements that had me wondering who all these people were and why were they doing whatever it was they were doing.

Things begin with your basic terraforming plot (I like the fact that we’ve gotten to a point where terraforming is right up there with boy-meets-girl as far as stories go - it feels like progress) where mom, dad, daughter, and soothingly voiced shipboard computer are all flying through space back to Earth on a mission to regenerate human life on Earth. I think I speak for a good deal of us hunky astronauts out there when I say that if this dad was a real NASA man, he’d be lobbying to repopulate this here mudball the old fashioned way.

Sadly though, he never even gets the chance to reconsider his wimpy ways because before you know it there’s a big radiation storm! Or something happens that forces them to put their kid in suspended animation on the ship under one of the oceans on Earth. I never knew what was going on. Part of it was the fact that even as I was listening to the English dub, I found it necessary to turn on the subtitles to understand what these fools were yattering on about!

If you’re going to hire someone to dub your movie, why can’t you get someone that speaks like a normal person? Why do we have the bad accents, the poor enunciation, and terrible attempts at pretending to be an innocent child? The voice acting was just horrible here. You may as well listen to the Japanese soundtrack and read the English subtitles. If you don’t speak Japanese, at least you won’t know how awful they were.

At some point after the daughter is revived, Glyptofane Sex gets wind that she’s up and about and is determined to capture her before she can restore life on Earth. I think good old G.S. attempted some feeble explanation for his antipathy toward more humans (probably some whiny crap about how all we do is wreck everything), but since I had no idea what this thing was, how he came to be, or what he was doing before the daughter (Amamiku) showed up, it was kind of hard to understand what his real problem with everything was.

If he was so smart and just floated around in his little base, what does he care what happens with the rest of the planet? But Glyptofane apparently doesn’t live by himself, because in a stroke of genius that screams “if one evil floating brain is good, then three more floating brains that aren’t evil are great” there’s some other brains hanging around, questioning G.S. and his schemes. Trust me, it’s much stupider than I make it sound.

Now even though the planet needs to be repopulated, it turns out that there’s still people hanging around in the ocean ready to help Amamiku out in her mission. Demonstrating that the lessons of Seaquest DSV continue to go unappreciated, they even have a robot dolphin that saves Amamiku from Glyptofane’s clutches!

The expected chase scenes between Amamiku, her friends, and Glyptofane provide some entertainment as the animation is very good at portraying a sense of speed under the water, but beyond the quality of the animation in general, there isn’t much to hold the viewer’s interest here. The sketchy plot and sketchier characters leave you scratching your head more often than not and the fact that the credits roll before we even hit the seventy minute mark is only further evidence of how wafer thin everything here is.

This was one of those movies that looked really good in the trailer and promised an epic kind of story about the future of Earth and its rebirth, but there’s no chance of succeeding when you saddle this thing with a villain that doesn’t make any sense and a lead character who would be terribly annoying if she actually played more than a marginal role in things. You know you’re in trouble when the animation of your characters has more depth than they themselves do.

© 2008 MonsterHunter