Name(s): Summer Wars / サマーウォーズ
Format: Movie

Mamoru Hosoda is a fairly prolific anime director I haven’t gotten much into yet, despite the fact that I enjoyed The Girl Who Leapt Through Time quite a bit. I chose to watch Summer Wars because the premise of it seemed a bit more unusual than his others. It’s also been compared several times to the westernized Digimon movie, which I haven’t seen since it came out so I can’t comment on the similarities. Summer Wars came out in 2009 and opens with Kenji Koiso, a typical 17 year-old virginal weirdo who’s never asked a girl out and has the physical sensitivity of an abuse victim etc., but naturally this also means he’s super good at Nerd Stuff like computers and especially math. Oh yeah, if you don’t want spoilers, avoid reading on and skip to the final paragraph for my general verdict.

Kenji codes for an online simulation called Oz, which is a massive worldwide sensation that pretty much everyone uses. In Oz people create grotesque avatars that look like… Digimon, and then travel this exciting white space filled with other floating avatars and objects to do literally anything. They can even log into their avatars and do their taxes and shop. Why anyone would need or even want to do that is anyone’s guess because it sounds more inconvenient, but basically Oz is this omnipresent networked monstrosity that is hooked up to absolutely everything and runs everything in the entire world ever.

Kenji has a girl—who we’re given no background on—run in on him coding, and she asks him to pretend to be her fiancé at a family reunion in order to make her grandma happy. Why is this girl, Natsuki Shinohara, hinted to be extremely popular and capable of asking literally anyone to do this job, picking the most unbelievable excuse for a boyfriend possible? Especially when he’s visibly having anxiety attacks just by being around her? His cover should’ve been blown instantly, but this is yet another anime more concerned with nerd wish fulfillment than logical writing.

Also, why is this even necessary? Natsuki says it’s to not disappoint her grandmother who she told had a super cool boyfriend, but what kind of excuse is that? Not only is Kenji the exact opposite of that description, which would foil her plan, but why the hell did Natsuki lie to her grandmother in the first place? Shouldn’t she be apologizing? Was she really worried her grandmother would be heartbroken over realizing her 18 year-old granddaughter is currently single? If that’s the issue, why does Natsuki immediately say that after her grandma’s birthday party is over that she’ll say they just broke up? Won’t it not even matter then? Why compound the lies and risk embarrassing yourself in front of your entire family? Why not just say you broke up before? This is the first plot device of the movie, and you can already guess the tone of the rest of this review.

So for whatever reason, Kenji is dragged along to this weekend family reunion. He meets Natsuki’s huge family, consisting of almost no notable personalities. They’re only eccentric because the family is big and in one place, and most of them will never do anything during the entire movie. This is a shame, because 90% of Summer Wars doesn’t take place in the digital world, but rather in this packed house with a bunch of stock personalities with no unique traits and one or two shouting uncles.

In the first night, Kenji gets a random text asking him to solve a cypher. Instead of sleeping, he instead spends hours into the night solving this cypher for no reason for a complete stranger. But oh dear, it turns out the cypher is the security code for the entirety of Oz, and a super-hacking AI has used it to take over and wreak havoc on the entire world because again, everything completely relies on this computer game.

This shows how implausible this set up is in the first place, because no one would ever, ever allow for such a completely codependent network like this precisely because of the massive security problems. Which is especially important when the world and every individual person’s data can be compromised just by solving a cypher that literally anyone can access from the damn log-in page. And if a math whiz who didn’t even place number one in his country can hack the biggest goldmine of information in the world, it’s a wonder how this is apparently the first time this has happened.

Stupid shit aside, the AI (named “Love Machine?”) begins hijacking accounts and is able to get whatever security clearance that account has. It keeps growing as it assimilates more accounts and everyone’s under a panic and failing to stop it. This is a good chance to talk about Oz, because like a lot of things in Summer Wars, it falls apart because it’s portrayed as a plausible device, but just rolls however it wants to without any context to define how it’s meaningful.

This isn’t Dot Hack, and players only have their computer screens and keyboards. Despite this, the perspective inside the game shifts to precisely-controlled movement, which doesn’t make sense, and there’s basically no rules from there. Combat is just whatever random array of moves someone’s avatar happens to have, and these realistically freeform Dragon Ball Z combat sequences are somehow controlled only by someone mashing on a keyboard.

The very few digital sequences in Summer Wars are little more than an excuse to show off some surreal art design and animation with the wide variety of stylistic character designs in the avatars. This can be fun to watch for all the variety in movements and animation with a lot of things moving around on screen at once, but without definitive plot or story context it’s just eye candy wank. And not even very good wank, since the Oz scenes are very, very infrequent and the environment of Oz itself is pretty dull to look at, just being a bunch of white space and flat projected screens, even though it’s apparently a virtual world that everyone lives in.

You’d think the technology would have higher standards, especially for something this popular on a worldwide scale. I’ve seen worlds and GUIs in decades old MMOs that have more going on in them. Outside of Oz, the art style and animation is nothing special. It’s all fairly realistic environments and character designs. Animation is fluid but nothing else. Not even the directing left much of an imprint on me. I think my favorite editing in the whole movie was a scene early on where someone tossed a helmet to the front of the viewer and just before it was caught the scene cuts with the sound of a baseball cracking and another family member is on TV playing baseball from the opposite angle the helmet was thrown. And that’s just a throwaway, plot-wise.

I literally just finished this movie, and I’m not even quite sure what to talk about because so much of its time felt like fluff. Probably because most of it is this uninteresting family playing around and talking about shit we as strangers have no reason to care about, how like generations ago they fought in wars and used to have a lot of money. So what? I don’t know any of you guys, and I don’t even like hearing my own family’s backstories at reunions.

Natsuki’s uncle suddenly shows up, despite not speaking to the family for ten years because he sold grandma’s property in order to fund his career and research in America. A pretty dick move honestly, and everyone’s reasonably upset at this “betrayal.” I don’t know why he didn’t just ask grandma if he could do that, since she seems pretty supportive, and I think he’d be a little concerned if he simply found out that she didn’t care about profit more than losing him.

Anyway, Natsuki wants to screw her uncle because this is anime, and it turns out that he created the Love Machine AI that’s destroying the world right now. Between Kenji being an Oz admin, Kenji randomly being invited to this get together, Uncle suddenly showing up at this tumultuous time, and another family member being the strongest player in Oz, this world is just full of coincidences. It turns out Uncle gave the AI to the United States, who wanted to test its hacking capabilities before buying it, and the United States dimwittedly set it on Oz.

Hold the phone. You mean to tell me that the goddamn United States made the decision to send a hacking program into a universal server that holds the entire world’s—including their own—information to test out how good it would be at compromising their own security? This is why hacking programs are tested on isolated servers and the like. Imagine if the US wanted to test out some new program and did so on their actual live military defense systems.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Somehow, none of the US’ top brass realized that if this was discovered—and no shit it would be, because everyone in the world relies on Oz—the United States would have basically committed an act of worldwide terrorism and betrayed every nation on the entire planet. This would be a catastrophic geopolitical nightmare that dampens the entire inevitable success of beating the program if you actually think about its implications. I don’t think they should’ve been so happy about saving one nuclear base—I’d be worried about all of the other ones after this scandal has probably ruptured several economies, political processes, and national securities.

Where was I? Oh yeah, that kid I mentioned earlier is Kazuma. He’s the world’s first hope for defeating Love Machine, because the best way to defeat an AI that can control all functions of a game’s code is to reduce its HP to 0. He gets his ass beat by Love Machine because it’s absorbed so many AIs, though why Love Machine doesn’t simply absorb Kazuma is anyone’s guess, because it looks pretty easy.

They decide to try this again, and Kazuma actually practices kung-fu in real life in preparation, which is pretty hilarious. I’d like to point out how apparently the precision of real-life kung-fu can somehow be transferred perfectly in-game from keyboard. I can’t even imagine a game being made that allows that much control with a keyboard.

Kazuma loses again, because this plan was stupid in the first place since Love Machine can basically “cheat.” Love Machine then figuratively says “fuck it” and fires Chekov’s Gun in the form of a satellite that’s been repeatedly mentioned, and aims it at a nuclear plant with a countdown displayed until it lands. Grandma, who has died at this point, has her will read off to the family after conveniently being found at random by Natsuki. The will does nothing but talk about Wabisuke, the uncle who abandoned the family, but for some reason, everyone sees that as reason to forgive, rather than focusing on how they went completely unmentioned in their grandma’s will, despite being more courteous to her.

Grandma says that in times of stress, sometimes everyone just needs to kick back and chill, y’know what I’m sayin’? Everyone takes that to heart and has a big meal, while the satellite and the apocalypse draw ever closer. I have to say, I don’t think grandma had the literal end of the world in mind when she wrote that message, and everyone should really be getting off their ass and trying to stop this thing, because everyone in the world who can is conveniently in the same place right now.

Uncle Wabisuke says that this is all just a game to Love Machine and it can’t resist a game (it was made for hacking, so that sounds like an ass pull), so the gang come up with a plan to have Natsuki challenge it to some old card game, wagering all the accounts its stolen so they can access the account that has the satellite’s GPS and can redirect it. Keep in mind that Love Machine has no reason to abide by any of this because it controls the entire game.

What follows is the card game match, pulled off with zero tension, because like everything else about Oz, we get zero context on the game. It’s rapidly plowed through, and we rarely see the board or the actual progression of each match, and there’s no strategy to speak of. This sequence is literally just cycled images of everyone’s reactions and cards being played with no explanation of what’s going on other than someone on our side remarking whether it’s going good or bad, so the game isn’t interesting or fun to watch.

These two digital whales that are the guardian spirits of Oz, and somehow haven’t been taken over by Love Machine, apparently grant Natsuki a “rare item” that changes her appearance for no reason. The item does absolutely nothing. It doesn’t give her an advantage in the game, so the whales should’ve just minded their own business.

If everything preceding this wasn’t pointless enough, Natsuki wins the game, but it’s immediately rendered moot by the fact the countdown is still going. None of this gigantic, triumphant attempt at an emotionally-charged scene mattered. Wabisuke begins to hack into Love Machine like he should’ve been doing in the first place, and Kenji is continuously trying to get into Oz by hacking cyphers to still attempt to redirect the GPS. What follows is some tech bullshit that doesn’t make sense, and Wabisuke weakens Love Machine, which allows Kazuma to punch it to death this time, and Kenji alters the coordinates of the satellite and it crashes, and everything’s okay except for the oncoming political chaos. Hooray. Oh, and Kenji gets a kiss and has a nosebleed. Anime.

In conclusion: Summer Wars? More like Summer Bores. I may have not been trying so hard to dismantle everything about this movie’s plot if at the very least the story it was telling wasn’t such a damn bore. Plot holes aside, Summer Wars is devoid of stylization sans the Oz scenes, which are barely featured and have aesthetic laziness of their own. This huge family is pretty ordinary all things considered, and lack individual motivations or strong personalities. They really just come across as faces bolstering the cast size to have more shit going on in each scene, even though so much of the conversations and events are meaningless on a plot-scale, and not entertaining when isolated.

Kenji has no attachment to this family whatsoever, and we barely get Natsuki’s perspective, and our lacking perspective on any family drama elements makes the narrative’s focus on them fall flat. Everything regarding the technology reeks of being written by someone who has no real-world concept of tech or video games, and it contrasts very poorly with the plausible tone the rest of the movie tries to take, despite its lightheartedness.

Oz has no mechanics or rules to make it fun or assist in fully understanding the scenes. Context is severely lacking, making every part of this movie feel like it doesn’t matter, which creates unsatisfying, contrived plot developments that are made up as they go along, making every twist not a twist. Countless scenes have nothing to do with anything, or even plot-relevant scenes that end up having no consequence.

I’ve heard of people saying this movie has commentary on technology, but what commentary? Yes, the world of Summer Wars suffers for its reliance on the Oz system, but that’s not a fault of technology so much as their own stupidity in designing it. And there’s no discussion or talk anywhere in the movie about the problems of that system or reforming it, and acknowledging a theme exists isn’t anywhere near as important as taking a stance on it. There’s also a light theme regarding Japanese family values that’s extremely generic sentimentality and buried under Kenji’s perspective, because it has nothing to do with him. Kenji should’ve just stayed home that day. Every true weeb knows that summer sucks, anyway.