Well, the weather is hot, the days are long, and most folks just want to do one thing about now: stay inside and play video games! Well, watching movies also tends to come up, so I guess it’s fitting that I’d tackle Summer Wars, a movie about the digital world.
Historically, I’ve been pretty sparse about reviewing movies (rather than series) on the blog, but this summer I’m going to set that aside for a little “film club”, working through a few specific titles with more typical fare between, and there didn’t seem a better place to start than this. True, of director Mamoru Hosoda’s filmography, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time would probably be the first on many folks’ lists, but Summer Wars fits the season and is nearly as well regarded.
Summer Wars starts by introducing us to the pale yet chaotic land of Oz, a digital realm that basically operates as a second proper world, including shopping, business, government apparatuses, and international communities powered by automatic translation.
It’s Google, Reddit, Amazon, Steam, and a dated VR Chatroom all in one.
There we see a pair of part-timers… only to cut to them in the real world when their senpai (a cute girl) insists she needs exactly one person for a part-time job escorting her back to her family’s home town. Naturally, both jump at it, and she picks her presumable favorite of the two.
The senpai in question is Natsuki Shinohara, who is making the trip for her grandmother’s 90th birthday. I’ll admit, that’s a pretty big deal, especially when arrival gets us some really lovely shots of a classic Japanese-style mansion suggesting that the family is old money on at least some side.
Her choice of porter and our lead is math whiz and fellow physics club member Kenji Koiso who she decides, to his surprise, to introduce to grandma as her boyfriend and, in fact, fiance. Especially with a long, fake background, this makes meeting the massive extended family a little awkward for the already socially awkward nerd. The arrival of Natsuki’s largely-estranged-from-the-family uncle, who she seems to actually like, makes things even more complicated.
Just when you think this is more of a family drama, Kenji receives a mysterious ciphered text message. Being the math whiz that he is, he figures it out overnight and replies. This unwittingly makes him the primary suspect in an ongoing and destructive hack of Oz, perhaps because his account has been stolen and is being used by the real hacker to play havoc.
Panicking, Kenji gets some help from his friend (a guest account to still interact with Oz with) a younger cousin of Natsuki, who is actually a top digital fighter in Oz. He takes on the account thief, but the not-quite-Kenji’s-avatar devours a couple bystanders to level up and beat down the king.
This foe is then identified to Kenji as a rogue hacking AI called Love Machine. Before this can really get out, though, the family hears the news and while they’re surprisingly reasonable hearing Kenji out and are more frustrated with Natsuki for the barrel of lies, the cop in the family still resolves to take him in to the station. On the way there, though, Love Machine starts screwing with the Oz-based digital systems that affect the real world, screwing up GPS and Traffic and spamming emergency responders with false alarms.
Thus, Kenji ends up hauled back to the house where Grandma is busy calling everyone important in the extended family to coordinate a sane response and the technically inclined are busy figuring out what Love Machine is up to.
Thus, Kenji uses his manual codebreaking skills to backdoor the right people into control, incidentally exonerating himself as it turns out that there were fifty-five correct solves of the mystery code the night before and he made a typo on the last letter, just getting his account stolen like everyone else who replied. Between Kenji’s cleanup and grandma’s coordinated response, the crisis seems to be solved.
But, while this may be a load off, the movie is far from over. After all, Love Machine is still out there. What’s more, the scummy uncle reveals that he coded Love Machine for the US military, and that it will continue to consume and grow with the power of millions. This leads to Grandma kicking him out at naginata-point and resolving that the family needs to fix their mess. Later, she asks Kenji once again to take good care of Natsuki, which one can imagine is quite the awkward request to live with when she passes away later that night.
In the wake, most of the family just wants to handle the funeral, but since Grandma had a heart monitor that was disabled by the Oz outage, a subset want revenge on Love Machine. To get it, they bring in a boat to use as a generator, a supercomputer, and all the skills of both their clan and Kenji and his friend to lay a trap and beat Love Machine in battle. Unfortunately, their computer overheats due to some of the ice being used to cool the room it was put in getting taken away to help preserve the corpse. This means that Love Machine can bust out of the trap in its ultimate form.
It then stages its own game: a two hour countdown before it crashes a space probe into a nuclear reactor, possibly causing untold damage to the world.
After calling back the uncle to help, Kenji and the family hatch a plan to get back the accounts used for GPS, which would allow them to stop the crash. To do this, the take advantage of the fact that Love Machine is all about games, and challenge it to Hanafuda with avatars as stakes, Natsuki (the best player in a family that’s all good, now that grandma is gone) stands as their champion, and outplays Love Machine easily, until a critical mistake gives us the last “all hope is lost” moment before all the remaining free users the world over arrive to stake themselves on Natsuki’s bet, complete with the “guardian angels” of the system giving her an awesome costume change. She wins with flying colors.
Even that’s not quite enough, as Love Machine uses its last two accounts to direct the satellite right at the family house. Kenji figures out they can spoof the GPS to knock it off course, but Love Machine throws passwords in the way. Good thing Kenji now has a lot of practice cracking them by hand, resulting in an impact nearby (forming a new hot springs) and property damage, but presumably nobody dead. Love Machine, meanwhile, is punched to oblivion in a grudge match with the little cousin.
In the wake of this, uncle turns himself in, the whole family seems to ship Kenji x Natsuki, and Natsuki is clearly over her uncle enough to go for that as well, leaving us off with Kenji fainting from a kiss or the last image, in the credits, of he and Natsuki holding hands. The end.
So, how was Summer Wars?
Honestly, this one felt like a marathon. Summer Wars is just a hair under two hours, which while pretty average by movie standards is a little longer than you tend to expect from animation in specific. Nothing beyond the pale, and nothing quite like it feels.
Sometimes, feeling long can be a bad thing, but in the case of Summer Wars, I think that’s to its credit. It feels long because it has many movements and, effectively, episodes. And all of them work well enough. We have Kenji recruited and meeting the family. We see him as the suspect, as Love Machine starts to cause trouble, including the first fight between Love Machine and the cousin. Then, as the chaos gets worse, Kenji is brought back to save the day. But the day doesn’t stay saved. We get some fairly meaty emotional downtime ending with Grandma’s death, and then launch into the first “trap” plan. When that fails, se go for the Hanafuda wager after an appropriate amount of hand-wringing. And then there’s the final “final clash” to divert the missile. If you padded it out, you could probably get a solid seven episodes out of this, even though the running time only covers four. When, rather than feeling rushed, it also has time for subplots that have their proper emotional pacing, I count that as a strength.
Like most digital-focused stories that don’t go to the level of esoteric that we see in Serial Experiments Lain, you could argue that while the Oz scenes are made to look reasonably impressive, most of what the characters actually do in this is hammer on keyboards or stare at their phones. But I think the film kind of addresses that by having sections of the family not understand (at least until the space probe threat begins), and by having some extra active bits in setting up the computer action. It gets a fishing boat parked in a rural lawn, at least it’s trying.
The animation looks good, the characters that get focus get dimension, and the supporting cast in the form of Natsuki’s extended family have a clear voice and provide a fun and inviting environment for most of the real world elements of the movie.
Honestly, I could cut there; it’s a great film. But just as I always try to find some sort of silver lining when a dark cloud crosses my plate (not that I am always successful), I do feel obligated to look for some kind of shadow when I’ve got a ray of sunshine instead.
So, I guess I would say that if I had a quibble about Summer Wars, it would probably be related to the romance. This is clearly supposed to be a decently important element, seeing as it basically bookends the film, but compared specifically to other greats it might be just a little underdone. Natsuki doesn’t get a lot of really focal scenes. We do know from the opening that she’s willing to be manipulative and she’s treated as kind of willful throughout, but despite a lot of words about the two of them (that she’s the “school idol” and that they share a club) we don’t really know how much Kenji thinks or feels about Natsuki. He gets pretty easily blushing or flustered when she’s around, but is that just because she’s a pretty girl and he’s never dated or is it specifically for Natsuki.
Meanwhile, she starts the picture still clearly hung up on her “first love” uncle, who she basically ditches Kenji to hang out with in the first evening, and whose credentials and backstory she pretty much used to fabricate her “perfect boyfriend” cover story for Kenji. But after Grandma dies she needs Kenji – not any other member of her family – to comfort her, and by the end she’s clearly all in favor of going with what both her late grandmother and huge family want and turning her starting lie into a truth. Did she already have eyes on Kenji? She did get him for the fake boyfriend game, but evidently he won rock-paper-scissors to play the role so I’m not sure how much we can attribute that to her will. I guess it was a pretty eventful two days, and Hollywood has done worse, but that’s still pretty quick if the answer is no.
But, while I can sort of pick at the romance angle, it is again only in contrast to films with incredible chemistry, not the rank and file. The romance here is clearly meant to be a side dish; the hacker action is the main course, so it’s not fair to put it up against something like Weathering With You (to name one of several recent Makoto Shinkai films that have a sort of teen-romance-fantastical-adventure vibe) where the romance is a much bigger deal.
So, for all that, Summer Wars gets an A. If you’re looking to get into cinematic anime beyond the oft-imported realms of Shinkai and Miyazaki, it seems a great place to get a start.