Summer Wars
Cinema Nova, 05/09/2010
Status: Behind by 5 films
Kenji, a timid but brilliant high school kid, gets a job working for Natsuki, a girl he fancies, to help out at her Granny’s 90th birthday party. It’s to be a large family affair at her country home (the ancestral samurai training house).
But the party planning is disrupted when a hostile AI hacker (called Love Machine, fer cryin out loud) breaks into Oz (a cross between the Internet and Second Life on steroids) and begins to wreak havoc with the computerized systems of world. It’s up to Kenji, Kazuma, a young martial arts champion and the rest of the resourceful family (sailors, paramedics and computer wholesalers) to stop it.
Trying to emulate the aesthetic - and the point - of online life and games in movies is a difficult thing to do. The scenes set inside Oz are the weakest in Summer Wars and don’t quite come off. The real strength of the film is in the politics and history of Natsuki’s large and diverse family. Like so much anime, though, it is really, really good looking.
