Spring 2026 – Week 12 in Review - Ai Animes 🤖

Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. I finished my run-through of Final Fantasy VIII this week, offering welcome closure to a lingering adolescent quest, in spite of the game’s third act being exceedingly underdeveloped. I suppose it’s a credit to the game’s character writing that I felt annoyed by how swiftly everything wraps up; this is definitely one of the best overall parties within the Final Fantasy lineage, and I’ll absolutely miss them. With that concluded, I’ve also been continuing a Blue Lions run of Fire Emblem: Three Houses, which has led me to the amusing revelation that there’s no real justification for house leader Derimi’s behavior, he’s just Like That. Sorta figured his route would offer similar revelations of intent to Black Eagles and Golden Deer, but nope, Derimi’s just some kind of feral, vengeance-driven creature. I’ll hopefully be wrapping that adventure up shortly, but in the meantime, let’s run down the week in films!

First up this week was Alligator, a creature feature starring an alligator with big dreams and even bigger jaws. Upon being flushed down a toilet in Chicago, our little buddy finds a steady supply of food within the hormone-injected animal runoff of a nearby laboratory, his hunger and size growing precipitously in response to this distinctive diet. Soon he’s all grown up and hitting the streets, determined to make his mark on the Windy City.

Alligator isn’t innovating or reinventing anything; it is Jaws set in Chicago with an alligator, and through its skillful dedication to that mission, it demonstrates that novelty is far less important than solid, effective fundamentals. Here, the most effective fundamental is the cast; the fantastic Robert Forster leads a stable of veteran character actors, each of whom lend a fragment of lived-in humanity to the feature, with Forster unsurprisingly excelling as a cop haunted by guilt regarding his former partner.

With such steady presences in front of the camera, Alligator runs through the classic Jaws beats with confidence and distinction, offering both satisfyingly explicit monster attacks and that crucial backdrop of seediness and paranoia, as various forces attempt to mint their own fortunes on the back of our poor mutated alligator. That’s really one of the things that sticks with me from Jaws and Alligator alike; not the threat of monsters out in the darkness, but the knowledge that we as a society would do so little to save ourselves, and less than nothing to save each other.

Next up was The Maze Runner, an adaptation of a dystopian YA novel from their post-Hunger Games heyday. Dylan O’Brien stars as Thomas, a sixteen-year-old boy who awakens upon a creaking elevator, with no memory of his previous self. Rising into a strange, enclosed meadow populated by other children, he soon learns they have been collectively trapped here, and forced to explore the dangerous, ever-shifting maze that is their home and prison.

The Maze Runner hits basically all the standard beats of its subgenre, with particular distinction in the field of “giving random proper noun titles to ordinary phenomena in order to make them sound more distinct and exotic.” The people who live in their glade are “Gladers,” the people who explore the maze are “Runners,” the creatures they face are “Grievers,” their imagined overseers are “Creators” – it’s all a little much, frankly, and makes me wonder what specifically prompted this trope of self-conscious nomenclature in the first place.

Anyway, I have to assume something was lost in the adaptation from book to screen, because The Maze Runner feels more like an outline than a fully fledged story. Every character possesses precisely one attribute which is their personality, and the speed with which Thomas becomes the heroic messiah of his new community offers less of a convincing coming-of-age portrait than an implication that everyone else in the glade spent three years twiddling their thumbs while waiting for someone to arrive who might think “hey, maybe we should investigate our surroundings and attempt to get out of here.” Plus we barely even get any maze action! If you’re offering me a film called “The Maze Runner,” you better deliver more than a scene and a half of mazes and/or running.

We then continued our journey through the Gamera canon, which required leaping forward nearly a decade to Gamera: Super Monster. Aliens once again threaten the earth in this entry, directed by the suspiciously familiar-looking Zanon spacecraft. After earth’s confusingly named heroes the Spacewomen fail to defeat him, they must rely on the connection between a young boy and the heroic Gamera, who will go on to face a boss rush of prior adversaries before setting his sights on Zanon. Also there’s a sideplot about a Zanon subordinate who eventually learns about friendship, sort of a lot going on here.

Helmed by Gamera’s long-time director Noriaki Yuasa, and once more intended as a sort of hail mary attempt by a floundering studio, Gamera: Super Monster is sadly less of a triumphant revival than the exhuming and parading of a decaying corpse. Basically none of Gamera’s appearances here are original to this film; instead, a significant portion of Super Monster’s running time is dedicated to playing the hits, as we run through the fight scenes of nearly every preceding Gamera.

All that reused footage means Super Monster is a total failure as a film, but it’s certainly an interesting historical artifact. The production team throws everything at the wall with this one – along with Gamera’s former adversaries, the film also features an obvious Star Destroyer, along with traditionally animated cuts from Space Battleship Yamato and Galaxy Express 999 that Gamera just sort of floats around. And the actual new footage, all centered around the Spacewomen and their young buddy, seem to attest to the changing interests of Japanese children, an effect bolstered by the clear disconnect between Tokyo as witnessed in the new and repeated footage. Every older film I watch is in some part an exercise in cultural anthropology, and the view witnessed through Super Monster’s seams is certainly more interesting than the feature itself.

Last up for the week was Raiders of the Lost Ark, the George Lucas-conceived, Stephen Spielberg-directed debut of Harrison Ford’s iconic Indiana Jones. In a tale harkening back to the serial adventures of the early 20th century, the globetrotting archeologist is swept into a hunt for the ark of the covenant, which is said to have contained the original ten commandments, and perhaps even the power of God. Racing against nazi adversaries intent on misusing its power, Jones will retrace a mythic journey across Egypt and beyond.

Having not fully watched Raiders since my numerous childhood screenings, I got to be dazzled anew by how goddamn well-constructed this adventure truly is. The cinematography is electrifying, forever drawing the eye while imbuing each composition with purpose and personality. The moment-to-moment action storytelling is exemplary, consistently embodying the fundamental rules of visually parsable conflict and escalation. The performances hit a perfect balance of sincerity and self-parody, aping legendary tropes while sculpting a legend of their own. The film is one of the purest bags of popcorn ever popped, and through its clarity of form demonstrates the clear craft of pure excitement. It is little surprise that Raiders essentially set the template for much of action-adventure gaming; all the rules for how you make interacting with physical obstacles and antagonists compelling are clearly laid out right here.

from Wrong Every Time https://ift.tt/DKMt10Q
via Ai Animes 🤖