Black Gate

A couple weeks ago, I discussed one of the movies I saw at this year’s Fantasia film festival, OXV: The Manual (which has since won the festival award for Most Innovative Feature Film). The last film I saw at the festival this year was one of the ones I was most looking forward to: the international premiere of Gatchaman, an adaptation of the Japanese cartoon series Science Ninja Team Gatchaman (which you might know as Battle of the Planets or G-Force, depending on your age and place of residence in the 70s and 80s). My reaction to it was a bit complicated. As an adaptation, it’s mediocre at best; as a film it has serious issues. But I enjoyed it quite a bit. A hell of a lot, in fact. And yet … I can’t help but be aware it could have been better.

Some basic information first: the film was directed by Tôya Satô from a screenplay by Yûsuke Watanabe. It’s scheduled to go into wide release on August 24 in Japan. The original cartoon show ran for 105 episodes from late 1972 to late 1974, and in 1978 was repackaged for North American audiences (with significant edits and some new bits of animation) as Battle of the Planets. It got a second translation in the 80s as G-Force. In Japan, the series has spawned a number of sequel series, with a new series set to begin airing later this year.

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The 2013 edition of Montreal’s Fantasia film festival is well underway and I’ve been able to see three films so far, with more planned. A few days ago, I watched The Garden of Words, a visually spectacular 45-minute slice-of-life anime, and at noon yesterday took in After School Midnighters, a kid-oriented 3D animated movie that nicely balances plot and wackiness. Then, later that afternoon, I attended a showing of OXV: The Manual, a science-fiction film premiering at the festival. I was impressed enough to want to write about it here.

OXV is an exceptionally strong film, not flawless, but dedicated to its ideas and the science-fictional notions driving its plot. At its core are questions of determinism and free will, questions the movie builds to and explores rigorously. Around these themes it subtly but surely builds a kind of alternate reality, then over the course of its story develops that reality in ways that we don’t expect. The structure of the film is complex without being hard to follow, and opens up into a larger tale than we might at first suspect. Overall, it’s hard not to think of Primer while watching it; it’s not that the two films are similar, but they’re both good films that tell truly science-fictional stories on relatively limited budgets.

In a world, and specifically an England, where people’s relative levels of luck have been measured scientifically, an absurdly unlucky boy falls in love with the luckiest girl in the world. The boy has a low ‘frequency,’ the girl a high one; they cancel each other out and create wildly improbable events if they spend more than a minute together. Young Isaac Newton — in this world, people are named for great scientists and thinkers; Isaac’s known as Zak — persists in loving Marie anyway, despite the fact that a side-effect of her high frequency is a lack of emotion. With his friend, Theodore Adorno Strauss, he struggles to come up with a way to change his frequency. They succeed, developing a ‘manual’ that suggests words that alter the speaker’s luck. The movie develops from there, exploring ramifications and unintended consequences of their discovery.

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