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B's Film Reviews 7

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Sukai Kurora (The Sky Crawlers)

3/5
Directed by Mamoru Oshii
1.85:1 - 122 m - Japan
2008 Nippon Television Network/Production I.G.

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With Mamoru Oshii you never really know what to expect from his films. At once he can be an exceptional director and storyteller when on top form; on the other he can get too tangled up with his high-flying conceptual rhetoric to leave one feeling a slight bit conflicted on what you are supposed get out of his stories. In this instance, his latest film Sukai Kurora (The Sky Crawlers) is a perfect case-in-point on the duality of Oshii's practices and ideas. Based on the novel by Hiroshi Mori, the film takes place in a utopistic alternate world that seems to be neither in the future nor the past (seemingly a mix of the 1940s with the 1960s), and centres around a group of young fighter pilots taking part in aerial battles that revolve around the idea that in a world where there is no war, a puppet war has been set up by independent war contractors to provide citizens a form of entertainment they can read about in the newspapers or see on the news, giving them a greater sense of reality when they have something to root for, and upholding peace by easing tension when citizens are so used to a world of aggression and violence.

The pilots are all genetically engineered humans (Kildrens) who are incapable of growing old or dying, being physically aged around 14-17 years old, and their only purpose is to fight in aerial dog fights without really knowing why they are doing that in the first place and against whom, only being able to die when shot down during a mission. To this world enters Yuuichi Kannami, a boy coming to replace a previous pilot nobody wants to talk about, and who seems to carry a constant sense of melancholy on him; a boy who seems to feel like he has experienced or seen many things around him before, though he can't really account for them. His immediate superior Suito Kusanagi (relation to Motoko Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell perhaps?), a Kildern with a daughter no less, also seems to harbour some kind of an aloof attachment to him from that start, and whenever Yuuichi asks anybody about things relating to the past, he is usually given the silent treatment. All around them, the permeating atmosphere constantly telling of possible real death the next time you go up in the air hangs over everything, and creates one incredibly moody and depressing picture; where the characters fully know there is nothing much else in their lives, making them really not worth much in the end, and with any day possibly being their last, it has cast a sense of resigned passivity over everybody and everything. It's like the film's slogan says, "Every day could be your last; live life like there's no tomorrow."

In typical Oshii fashion, The Sky Crawlers is an extremely languid film. This is something a lot of other films from the director also showcase for better or for worse, but in The Sky Crawlers it has been brought up to the max. There is a very distinct feeling of stillness in everything that ranges from the gloomy, blueish colour palette to the drabness of the characters appearance, as well as their attitude of quiet, overwhelming melancholia. And truly apart from a couple of brief scenes of airplane fights, most that the characters are ever seen doing is move around quietly from one place to the next, speaking in hushed tones, sitting around not doing much, and spending their time boredly bowling, drinking, smoking, or going to the whore house, seemingly the only bright spot in this entire world apart from the meat pies. This overwhelming sense of isolated sorrow is both a strength and a weakness: strength in consistently keeping up the tone of the film's main idea, and weakness in making the viewer easily antsy in wanting to see something more remarkable happening instead of just quiet conversations on meaningless issues and slowly hinted secrets behind the character actions and lives.

In this regard The Sky Crawlers is both an alluring experience as much as it is frustrating. A few other characters DO provide little spots of colour on occasion, like Yuuichi's closest friend Naofumi Tokino with his playboy-ish attitude, Midori Mitsuya (voiced by Chiaki Kuriyama, better known as Go-Go from Kill Bill) with her angry and frustrated petulance, the two prostitutes who better show their caring of the pilots than anybody else, and Towa Sasakura as the elder mechanic who has seen enough of life to live in perpetual depression herself. But it is the inherent sense of gloomy sadness that characterises the majority of the film and undoubtedly will be the lynchpin on whether you'll enjoy this film, or simply find it boring. The animation quality continues straight from Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence's development in fusing together rotoscoped CGI with cell animation. Basically the characters and their immediate physical surroundings tend to be in a more traditional drawn style, while the backgrounds and the planes themselves are CGI renderings with a healthy use of Gaussian blur to give everything a bit more of a "wet" look. Whether this is to your liking will of course depend, and it may take a few moments to really absorb the stylistics, the aerial battles particularly tending to swish into blurry goop, but it does also provide moments of alluring, dreamlike beauty just the same.

With the dominating blue tints it both emphasises the clear beauty of the skies, while also weighing down any sense of lightness to which the generally drab clothing do nothing to lift this feeling of melancholy. And the few action scenes don't much help to alleviate this since they are often brief in length and detail, and even then most of these fights you'll never see instead of being told of them through news reports and people staying back not taking part in the battle. Even the slight romance sub-plot between Yuuichi and Suito adheres closely to this atmosphere in being anything but romantic and comes across more desperate, and at the end of the day much devoid of warmth. This added to the rumours that Suito has killed her previous lover (namely the pilot Yuuichi has come to replace), and how she always carries a loaded gun with her as if it's a death wish, only adds further edginess amongst the disconnected display of feeling that seems both desirable and unbearable.

Ultimately The Sky Crawlers is a film that is both alluring and distancing at the same time. The very slow pacing that is reflected in just about everything apart from the few action moments, deliberate weighting of death over the characters' heads with them fully knowing this, and concepts that aren't necessarily delivered with as much clarity and impact as one would probably want, makes for a film that is likely to find its advocates and detractors. For sure Oshii has found a perfect middle ground between life and death in this purgatory of a world that has no future nor past, but while so doing also has made a film that can easily go off to a land where the viewers themselves can start to feel the effects of impatience and reticence of caring. The voice acting is generally good, but not outstanding, with most talking in ways that doesn't much bring out emotive character, apart from perhaps the more fiery Chiaki Kuriyama as Midori, or the couple of prostitutes that are more lively in personality. Also this film is a great example of why Japanese people should probably just stick to speaking in Japanese as there are quite a few English lines in the film that the actors are very obviously trying hard to get right. This leads to some sentences sounding either fuzzy, or then stiffly unnatural when they try to phonetically enunciate everything.

At the end of the day, The Sky Crawlers left me with a bit of an empty and unfulfilled feeling afterwards. It does have intriguing ideas and the futileness of the main characters caring for their lives comes across admirably, but it still leaves one pretty cold once all is said and done since these ideas are never truly explored to the extent they could yield material to. Certainly if you're looking for an action film you won't find it here, and if you can't appreciate the slow moving, almost depressing storyline, then the likeliness is that you will loose any interest in the film long before it ends. In the end I was hoping more from this film, no matter how much I enjoy seeing thoughtful films in this world of hectic downpour of fast moving Flash Gordons. Simply a vacuous, never-ending feeling of futility is not the best emotion to be left with when you're still hungering for more connectivity to the people who just don't care.
Review of Mamoru Oshii's The Sky Crawlers.
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