The unworthy offspring - War of the Worlds: Goliath

We are getting back to the War of the Worlds franchise a bit. I have to make up for an old debt of mine. I try to focus  on relatively fresh alternate history/historical fiction material and reviews more and more on these pages, and the War of the Worlds: Goliath of 2012 borderline qualifies that criterion. This is an anime made by Americans, actually. Admittedly, I made only brief trips into the anime world yet. According to my limited cinematic experience, the message and the story of Japanese animes with a Japanese topic are a little hard to grasp onto. It doesn’t work for me either when they try to touch Western history. This happened to me when I was watching the Steamboy anime.

War of the Worlds. Yes, we have been here before. Tripods surrounded with clouds of poison gas, vaporizing death ray, bloodsucking aliens from Mars, red weed, and the glorious Earth bacteria, you name it. The War of the Worlds: Goliath is an interesting anime adaptation of the original H.G. Wells novel. A historical fiction work with steampunk elements, or more like a pseudo-sequel of the original. 

The plot takes place fifteen years later after the original Martian invasion of 1899 and tells a story about a second attack. The anime refers back to the first invasion with beautiful pictures in the intro. Not a single word is told, but none is needed, they are telltale and plastic, completely functional from a dramaturgical point of view. I’m afraid we have just touched the most valuable parts of the movie already.

Fifteen years ago, faceless invaders from the hell of deep space commited genocide against humanity. Now it's time for a rematch.

World War One has been just postponed

It’s not like the story writers didn’t have some good ideas. Placing an international elite military squad into the age of ultra-nationalism was a daring and promising attempt to get my attention. The respective national consciousnesses of the age were absolute and look incredibly competitive nowadays. I mean, grade school children were taught to verse warmonger poems about exterminating each other, not to mention the racial theories. The Martian invasion changed the Earth of this alternate universe forever, of course. Still, a multi-racial strike force against the aliens promised a lot of interesting interaction between the team members. 

The Goliaths of the human battleline. A lot of effort went into the promotion of the anime.

Somebody said explosions…?

There are some, but I wasn’t satisfied. The main reason for this that the storywriters had settled for a Michael Bay-ish visual orgy with pasteboard characters and action movie cliches. I consider Bay as the apostle of the cinematic equivalent of sleep-denying torture.  He doesn’t use the story to keep your attention but every tricks of visual compulsion. Release me- you are screaming internally. I broke halfway on Transformers 2 and wept.

It's not like the Martians didn't make some improvements.

The War of the Worlds: Goliath is not that bad, but it’s not far off either. Japanese stories are maybe a bit hard to digest, or I’m just lacking the required sensitivity and cultural background to grasp them. Maybe it’s just the different strokes, but the real trainwreck is when Western creators utilize a fashionable template (in this case, the anime-style) to produce a cliched animated action movie. I’m afraid that the War of the Worlds: Goliath is not really more than that. 

Again, much effort into the design and visuals of Goliath. No argument there.

Don’t get me wrong, our nine year old kids will be charmed. But for me, The Great Martian War 1913-1917 had more entertainment value, despite it’s nowhere close to the visuals of the Goliath with its cheap manipulated historical footage and fake interviews. Too much effort into the visuals, too less into the story, that’s why I consider War of the Worlds: Goliath as a failure. H.G. Wells deserves more.

Zipang - Ode to an extinct order, the Imperial Japanese Navy

Cover for the English edition on DVD. Wikimedia.

I have to admit that my knowledge at the anime world is very limited. Since the Akira, which I did not really comprehend I hadn’t watched another. But when I had stumbled upon the anima-series Zipang I was genuinely surprised how mature and intelligent work I was looking at. Cultural differences did not limit my understanding of this manga adaptation, and the 26 episodes had a great promise for quality entertainment. If you like history or big battleships, if you find astounding situations and how human-like characters handle them fascinating, you cannot go wrong with Zipang.

Zipang – for a different Japan

Plot quality

It's not the first time that science-fiction and alternate history writers toy around with time travel. One liked plot element is that high-tech military hardware appears in the distant past . Think about Confederate soldiers of the American Civil War with AK-47s or what if Napoleon had a B-52 bomber by Waterloo. Rest assured, nothing as stupid like the latter here. But after a Bermuda-triangle-like experience, one advanced warship of the Japanese Self-Defence Forces runs into an unknown armada, which set sail for a mission with crucial importance and historical significance.

This scene never ceases me to give the goosebumps. The Mirai on collision course with the biggest and meanest battleship ever built. At least the writers didn't make it a spaceship this time. No pun intented, Starblazer-fans.

Les chroniques d'un newbie

The Aegis destroyer Mirai has enough firepower to sweep away waves of piston engined attack planes or  to destroy whole contemporary battle fleets. This might well sound like the Final Countdown movie from 1979, except the protagonists switched sides. So much for originality. But the way the storyline of Zipang builds up and showing what lesser known forces were at work then makes you think how different imperial and the post-war Japan could have been? The Pacific War is a goldmine for alternate history novels.

When these shoes are on the other foot. Classic dogfight scene from the movie The Final Countdown

Entertaining factor (SPOILER ALERT!)

Although I have to give a fair warning that Zipang isn’t a revisionist hymn for the Imperial Japan nor an Axis of Time-like historical cataclysm. What Zipang puts into a perspective is how historical and the made-up characters would act if they somehow receive a wake-up call (in that case, the appearance of the Mirai), a hindsight about the end of the line, and how they would struggle to trigger something different and less grim than the looming total defeat.

One big flaw of the series is that it feels unfinished somehow. Like the writers were afraid of the potential of the plot and upsetting national feelings much on both sides of the Pacific. They had touched the plot maybe with too much care and sophistication, and then did not give Zipang a satisfying end.

Who are we? Soldiers of Japan or embassadors of an enlightened future ?

Homework

I felt Zipang like a drama of the other then Japan, which is not ultra-nationalist nor warmonger. It is very aware of its own precarious situation, but wants to shape its own future by everybody’s rules nevertheless. This is what makes Zipang particularly interesting for a history buff. The world war and „future” military hardware and tactics, their clashes are well worked out. Someone did watch for the details with enthusiasm.

A scene of the Manga-series. Available on http://manga.animea.net/

Endwords

But as I tried to imply earlier you shouldn't watch Zipang for glorious Japanese troops armed with high-tech equipment or for a radical (and of course, fictional) rewriting of real-life historical events. Such works exist in the anime world, we might come back to them later. But those are meant strictly for a Japanese  niche audience, and it would be a bad move to introduce them in the West or in different regions of the Far East for that matter… 

Nope, The authors of Zipang wrote for two markets, and the animated version of the series are available in English (if you don't mind certain Japanese officers with a Texan accent), without the danger of upsetting the war winners and their need for feeling righteous much.

Attila