SUMMER WARS

DESCRIPTION

CAST

MANGA ComedySummer Wars
NOVEL ComedySummer Wars

REVIEWS

• 

  CaninnTurtle

  81/100
  Summer Wars does a superb job of showing off the life of being part of a large family.

  Ah, Summer Wars. I had no expectations whatsoever for it, but it pleasantly surprised me. Its characters had personality and heart, even if they were nothing but the most inconsequential part of the Jinnouchi clan. I have to admit, I wasn't expecting it so be such an ensemble kind of a movie when I read the summary. I mean, how often do you see an ensemble movie? In that regard, it surprised me in a good way. Everything in the movie worked, even if it wasn't exactly what I was expecting. I had only seen one other movie from Director Mamoru Hosoda, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, and I could definitely see similarities in style, which wasn't a bad thing by any means, but it's definitely not a standout of his at all.

  I think I had really similar complaints with The Girl Who Leapt Through Time in regards to art style and such. That would be that I don't really like the fairly muted color palette that both used. There are so few bright colors that it feel as if nothing really pops out to you visually. Now, all that is a criticism for the real world color palette, but all of the Oz scenes? Those were beautiful. They really used color to another level in those sequences, which I guess was the point, but it still doesn't make me like the muted colors any more.
  The soundtrack was there, I suppose. It felt like really generic movie music, if I can be perfectly honest. The ending song is actually pretty solid, it felt like an Japanese, old-school country song. It's a cool little change up.

  Can I even have a favorite character for Summer Wars? I felt like the whole family was my favorite character, so whatever lets do it.
  Favorite Character: The Jinnouchi clan

  

  I'm not even joking, the whole family was great. Their interactions were so awesome and realistic. Summer Wars probably resonated with me so much because it reminds me of my own big family, in which, I can say that this is an accurate representation of a large family gathering. The banter, the arguing, the competition, all of it. Even to the point where, despite all the fighting, everyone loves each other at the end of the day. Summer War's representation of family is why I loved the movie to the extent that I did. As an aside, shout out to the Baseball Jinnouchi. He was the real soldier, making it to nationals through all of that struggle and without knowing any of the crazy stuff that was happening while he was doing it. Here's to you Baseball Jinnouchi.

  I did have a few issues with Summer Wars, though, and most of them can be traced back to the overarching story and Oz. The whole movie would have been 100% better without the silly Oz drama or any of the Oz sequences. Sure, I mentioned earlier that all of the Oz scenes were beautiful, and they were, but the context behind those scenes was ridiculous. The whole story revolving around Oz is laughable, honestly, and really, I could have done without any of it. I loved the family aspect of Summer Wars enough that I could have watched a whole movie about it, without any of the insanity happening online. I understand that a lot of motivating factors would have been lost, but hey, that's why imagination exists.

  For those issues, I do have to drop Summer Wars into the 80s, but it was still worth watching for the family interaction alone. I feel like Summer Wars really missed out on a lot of potential, but despite that, still managed to pull something pretty good together. If you like ensemble casts or family interaction than Summer Wars is a movie for you, but if you're in it for the story, you're probably not going to love Summer Wars.

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• 

  Miposky

  70/100
  Summer Wars is a strange, enjoyable movie that could have been so much better.

  Summer Wars is part family drama, part sci-fi adventure. It tells the story of a family birthday reunion alongside a hacking debacle in a virtual reality world used by everyone.

  Kenji Koiso is hired by Natsuki Jinnouchi to pretend to be her fiancé in front of her large family and formidable grandmother. While there Kenji integrates into the family in a rather strange way by working alongside them to put an end to a problem in Oz, the virtual reality they all participate in, that is currently wrecking havoc in the world.

  I went into this completely blind and came out of it pleasantly surprised. It was definitely not the movie I was expecting, and not the “wars” I was imagining. As the summary above mentions, it combines two story elements that you wouldn’t think to normally combine, and the resulting experience is an interesting one. Though I mostly enjoyed it, I have mixed feelings about the unlikely pairing.

  On one hand, adding the sci-fi aspect to the family drama, infuses the latter with a certain level of energy and freshness and adds a touch of lightheartedness to it that precludes too much melodrama. It also serves to move the story forward. In line with this, adding some family drama to the sci-fi escapade, gives the sci-fi element more weight, contextualizes it, and raises its emotional stakes.

  On the other hand, however, placing the two together is incongruous enough that it can sometimes feel like watching two separate movies at once. Plus because of the split in narratives, the movie is unable to focus on just one, resulting in a lack of depth to each to the storylines.

  Personally, I would have preferred to see more of the family drama. I love how the movie portrays it as both charming and chaotic, and it makes me almost regret not going to more reunions. Every shot is filled with vitality, and my eyes always manage to land on some kind of activity happening in the background. A little bit of romance is added at end, and though it feels rushed and unearned, I’m not that bothered by it because I see it as just peripheral to the main story. The sci-fi half of it is beautiful and presents an interesting premise of worldwide virtual involvement and dependence, but that’s about it. It mainly follows a generic hacking plot line and doesn’t introduce the virtual world to us beyond its basic appearance and functions.

  It’s a bizarre, wacky film that has some flair and heart to it, but it could have benefited from a deeper and longer exploration of many of its elements. There is some emotional resonance, but not enough to leave a lasting impression. And while I enjoy the off-kilter sense to it, it does not fully succeed in completely showcasing its two storylines.

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• 

  TheAnimeBingeWatcher

  70/100
  Feels like two very different movies fighting each other for screen time; thankfully, both movies are pretty good.

  If there’s a common theme across Mamoru Hosoda’s work, at least of the films I’ve seen so far, it’s the idea of the fantastical invading the real, and the real adapting to accommodate it. Unlike most Ghibli films, which take place in worlds apart from reality or otherwise spirit their characters away from the real world, Hosoda’s films involve the real world itself being invaded by something outside the norm. And the characters’ ordinary lives pretty much keep trucking on as normal, acclimating to their new, fantastical circumstances without changing the core of how they go about living. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and Wolf Children both center around this idea, observing how Mamiko and Hana’s lives both change and stay the same as a result of the bizarre situations they find themselves in. And if there’s a reason I don’t like Summer Wars nearly as much, it’s because the marriage of reality and fantasy here is far more uneven than either of those films. The grounded, down-to-earth human drama and the out-there, bonkers high concept influencing that drama don’t gel the way they need to, and the result is that it often feels like I’m watching two movies at once. Thankfully, both of those movies are damn good in their own right, so Summer Wars still ends up pretty enjoyable in spite of itself. But this is definitely the weakest Hosoda film I’ve seen thus far.

  So, the first of Summer Wars’ two movies is the story of Kenji, your average socially awkward high school dweeb who spends most of his time playing games on line. Unexpectedly, he gets roped into helping his beautiful upperclassman Natsuki, and he agrees to travel with her out to the countryside for her great-grandma’s birthday party. You see, old granny’s the matriarch of one of those super huge families where everyone and their uncles and cousins lives in the same giant house. They’re a rowdy, rambunctious crowd, full of strong personalities and even stronger ties to their storied history as one of Japan’s longest-lived family lines. They’re also staunch traditionalists, and Natsuki promised her great-grandma that she’d introduce her to her boyfriend and future husband before she dies, despite the fact that she doesn’t actually, like, have a boyfriend. So she’s hired Kenji to play the part just until the party’s over, so her grandma can rest assured she’s leaving her family line in good hands. Kenji is understandably not prepared for any of this shenanigannery, but it’s too late to back out now. And over the course of about a week as the party preparations go on, he becomes privy to this family in all its squabbling, proud, messy glory, as well as all the long-unhealed wounds that keep them from truly coming together.

  That’s one of Summer Wars’ storylines. The second storyline is about fighting a digital terrorist in an MMORPG to stop him from blowing up a nuclear power plant.

  Yeah, now you’re starting to see how weird this movie is.

  See, the “game” Kenji’s always playing is actually the OZ, a kind of all-purpose digital landscape where you can do business, play games, hang out, and pretty much anything else you can think of. Picture the OASIS from Ready Player One, except it’s still on consoles instead of VR. One night while he’s at the country house, Kenji answers a spam mail that accidentally causes a breach in the OZ’s security system, letting in a rogue AI that proceeds to start devouring the entire place whole. And since pretty much all the world’s major companies and governments have OZ servers to help run things, that means literally every single system of society is compromised. If the program isn’t stopped, it’s just going to keep breaking things until it causes a potentially extinction-level disaster. So Kenji has to enlist the help of the family’s reclusive gamer son, and eventually, the entire rest of the family, to fight off this danger from inside the digital world, which is represented as a fully immersive Apple Store-esque landscape upon which digital avatars punch each other and destroy the scenery around them like they’re in a cyberspace DBZ spinoff. The film’s titular war is one in which the old matriarch is a general, her sons and daughters soldiers, and the enemy a near-future sci-fi concept that forces the fractured family to come together in the face of adversity, restore their fractured bonds, and save the world by fighting as one loving, rambunctious unit.

  And honestly, that’s not a bad idea for a film. In fact, what makes Summer Wars overall a good movie despite its flaws is how sincerely it tries to thematically tie these two halves together. The family is obsessed with tradition and lives in a huge, old-timey country house that’s bursting to the seams with history and connections, but it’s only by embracing the new rules of the digital world- embracing the future as personified by the youngest among them, who end up carrying them to victory- that they’re able to overcome their bad blood and work together. The internet isn’t presented as a force that tears families apart, but as a place of family in its own right, where you can forge connections and help each other in ways you couldn’t before. The old matriarch summons her endless web of friends and connections from every walk of life to rally against the digital threat, but the community of online players is just as essential to their eventual success. It’s a story of past and future coming together, future embracing the strength of the past and past embracing the possibility of the future. Only with both sides, the tech-savvy youngsters and the community-driven old-timers, is the war able to be won. And in the few moments those two halves are working in tandem, you can see the masterpiece that Summer Wars had the potential to be.

  Sadly, for the most part, those two halves don’t mesh nearly as well as they need to. The stuff with the family and the stuff with OZ often feel like they’re fighting each other for screentime, and the result is that neither is as developed as they could be. The OZ system itself is overemphasized in the opening scene and talked about as if it could be a setting for an entire other anime all on its own, but in the story, it’s only ever important insomuch as it facilitates cool sci-fi cyberspace fight scenes. It’s revealed that the family actually has a connection to the cause of the rouge AI, but the twist is too easy to see coming and the character in question only gets the barest minimum characterization, so the emotional weight is lacking. There’s also the unfortunate problem that the two nominal leads, Kenji and Natsuki, are easily the blandest and least interesting characters in the movie, and their inevitable romance is as unengaging as you probably guessed. Not even Natsuki taking center stage for the final battle is able to save her from being little more than The Love Interest. None of this kills the film, but it’s all these little subpar details that keep it from shining like Hosoda’s work usually does.

  Still, Summer Wars is far from awful, and the moments that work really do work. I love the kooky, rambunctious family dynamic, how true to life their closeness feels, how many charming little moments are packed into the margins (Hosoda remains, if nothing, a master of expressive character animation). This is far from his best work, but there’s still enough good here that I don’t mind the two hours I spent on it. Sometimes, that’s all you can ask for.

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