Review: Summer Wars

Summer Wars | Mamoru Hosada | MadHouse | Warner Bros. Pictures | August 1, 2009

In his seminal 1984 novel, Neuromancer, William Gibson defined cyberspace as:

“A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.” – William Gibson, Neuromancer

Since then cyberspace has grown from being a plot device used by forward thinking science fiction writers into a rudimentary science experiment and finally to where we stand now, growing more reliant on an ever expanding web of interconnected devices with each passing day. It isn’t any wonder that hackers have remained a relevant character trope over the course of the past 30 years, from Neuromancer, to The Matrix, and the sort of cyberpunk revival going on around the video game scene this year with games like Watch_Dogs and Cyberpunk 2077 on the horizon. Anime has always been a bastion for cyberspace-related stories. Still, recent films such as Mamoru Hosada’s 2009 cyberpop epic, Summer Wars, have pushed the cyberspace-themed genre in a new direction. While lacking the revolutionary vision of early cyberpunk fiction, Summer Wars is a movie that’s sure to entertain a wide audience while presenting a discursive narrative about the dualistic relationship between human beings and the internet which is all the more relevant with the term “cyber pearl harbor” being thrown about the media these days.

Phew. I hope I made my English teachers proud with that one. If all of that was a bit much too swallow, don’t worry about it, Summer Wars manages to take what is normally presented as a dense pastiche of vague metaphysical concepts and transform them into an easy to swallow little pill (though whether or not that pill is red or blue, of course, is up to you). That’s what I mean by the distinction between the tossed and tired cyberpunk genre and the relatively unused moniker cyberpop. Summer Wars eschews the typical cyberpunk bondage gear clad anti-heroes for a cast made up of a nearly-mundane modern upper class Japanese family and their colorful avatars, it takes cyberpunk’s destitute dystopian Urban sprawls and substitutes them with a feudal era villa, it chooses to depict an optimistic story about the social network’s capability of bringing people together rather than becoming another pessimism drenched cyberpunk tale about the loss of humanity to the machine overlords.

Summer Wars trades it’s scenes between an intuitively designed social network, OZ, and the real world city of Ueda, Japan. You can think of OZ as a sort of catchall social network which incorporates shopping, industry, communication, gaming, etc. under its nebulous web. The OZ user interface is designed to look like a video game populated by user designed avatars, a throwback to William Gibson’s assertion that cyberspace had its roots in the arcades of the 1970s. Strikingly, the UI of OZ, seems to prophesize or at least inspire the social network integration seen in the interface of Nintendo’s new Wii-u console. The world of OZ is a playground of sorts for the animators at Madhouse, a beautifully rendered alternate reality where countless inspirations meet, a worldwide common ground where Walt Disney and Nintendo shake hands in an explosion of color set against a pristine apple-white back drop. The pop-culture influence on OZ doesn’t end there, in a clever nod, OZ is reigned over by two crowned flying whales named John and Yoko, a fitting tribute that says as much about America and Japan as it does relate to the film’s imagining of “a brotherhood of man”.

It’s an imagining of the social network that is an impressive visual metaphor despite some fishy choices in terms of its internal logic. But that’s not what this movie is about, like I said earlier, this movie takes what became the cyberpunk ethos of (sometimes) focusing on a strict set of technical rules and throws it out the window in favor of focusing on a story about a boy and a girl, you know, human beings (a humane pathos, if we’re trying to make our teachers proud).

The story finds 17 year-old mathlete Kenji Koiso preparing for a summer spent making a few extra bucks doing some server maintenance on OZ with his buddy, Takashi. Enter Natsuki, an upper classman with blood ties to an old money feudal clan, a sort of untouchable girl asking the two nerds in front of their computer screens if either of them is looking for a little summer job. Kenji and Takashi draw straws and it’s decided that Kenji will accompany Natsuki to her grandmother’s estate where he is to assist in the preparations for the grandma’s landmark ninetieth birthday party. To Kenji’s chagrin, when he and Natsuki arrive at her family’s sprawling homestead Natsuki reveals that Kenji’s real job is to pose as her boyfriend, as Natsuki had promised her ailing grandmother that she would bring her non-existent boyfriend to the summer’s festivities. So Kenji is faced with the awkward task of assuming a false identity to impress Natsuki’s samurai blooded clan.

Meanwhile, in OZ, a rogue artificial intelligence named Love Machine has sent out the code to OZ’s supposedly unbreakable security system under the guise of a brain teaser. Kenji, the math-whiz, solves the code in a night and wakes to find himself implicated as the hacker responsible for shutting down OZ and stealing the accounts and private data of hundreds of millions of OZ’s users. This is not a good thing, as it reveals to Natsuki’s family that Kenji is not who he claimed to be. The rogue AI goes on to use OZ’s software infrastructure to affect the actual world: messing with traffic signals, altering water pressure levels in city water supply systems. When I said OZ was all encompassing I wasn’t lying, by having access to all of OZ’s typically tightly guarded systems, Love Machine is free to wreak havoc across Japan and the world.

The story manages to remain engaging and coherent as it jumps between the cyber war in OZ and the real world consequences of that war, an impressive feat considering the jarring aesthetic differences between the two realities. That duality is basically the keystone which the movie rests upon. How the synthesis of reality and the social network is creating a completely new environment full of new kinds of threats, a theme that runs its course into Kenji’s call to arms against Love Machine amongst the remains of an ancient Samurai clan. Summer Wars is really talking about the universality of human virtues, that honor and duty reside as much where fingertips meet a keyboard as they do where a katana severs a jugular, that our online identities are as much an extension of ourselves as we are of them. It’s some pretty heady stuff and it’s all handled brilliantly by Mamoru Hosada, a young director out of Japan who has begun to have his name tossed around with the likes of little people like Hayao Miyazaki.

Now that that’s been aired out, the flick is not without its flaws. For instance, it relies on tropes a little too heavily, specifically with regards to its main characters who seem to be little more than archetypes ripped off and thrown into this story for convenience and uniformity. While that’s true for the main characters, it is not true of the supporting cast. Namely, Natsuki’s family who at times outshine the lead characters to a ridiculous extent. The movie really stands out, for me, in those moments with the family sitting about the dinner table, talking over each other and laughing.

I understand that using those tropes for the main characters was a smart choice, it frees the viewer to spend more time getting to understand the logistics of the world of OZ and the wide cast of supporting characters. This is important for a movie of this scope and length, as it is obviously intended for a wide audience. Still I can’t help feeling a little alienated and hesitant to give this movie an outright recommendation knowing that I felt a little alienated myself by some of the marked choices to sacrifice technological coherency in favor of dazzling visuals and a heartfelt story. Weirder still, I was turned off by some of the OZ action scenes which seemed a bit out of place set against the serene beauty of the Ueda  scenes. At times, the real world, which possesses so much of its own marvelous attention to detail in architecture and nature just seemed, to put it simply, better than the garish and stylized OZ.

But I’m not a heartless bastard, and this is a movie that is sure to entertain just about anyone, it succeeds in being funny and thrilling with a well timed bit of Disney-esque tragedy thrown in for good measure. This isn’t necessarily a movie for me and I respect that. There was more than enough cultural, political, historical, and personal commentary involved that I was left with a good bit of gristle to chew on while letting some of the mindless action wash over me.

I’ve heard it said that “All art is commercial art.” In as much as there is a paying audience in mind in its conception I guess this has to be the case. Summer Wars is a piece of commercial art, cyberpop, a further transmutation of the commoditized cyberpunk genre. This does not mean that it is not art, the attention to detail and manpower needed in the feat of producing an animated work of this magnitude requires a great deal of effort on the part of many skilled artists. Luckily it is more than a commodity, there’s an important story behind the whole affair. A story whose thematic overtones of a past reconciling itself to a threatening and vastly different future reminds me of a little passage from Jack Womack’s afterword to Gibson’s Neuromancer:

“To be truly ready to confront the future—actual or imagined, societal or personal—and to live reasonably within it once you are ready, an entente cordiale must first be made with the past, and the past is always the more frightening of the two. Traveling from past to future means looking and leaping, stepping blindly into the void, passing through the darkest of hollers. Sometimes the leap needed seems too far, the void too empty, the holler too oddly reassuring in its darkness. But there is no avoiding it: Hope that you’ll emerge on the far side with minimal trauma; have faith, pray, wish as you will, but as science fiction writers know so well, there’s no predicting what will be. Cliches became cliches for a reason; that they usually hold at least a modicum of truth, and the following cliche is truer than most: You can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been.” – Jack Womack

Luckily for all its silly charm, tropes, and naive optimism, Summer Wars manages to be a movie that will entertain the masses as well as those looking for a little more substance with their coca-cola. If you’re looking to catch a bit of anime (so long as American animation studios are still milling about with talking animals), it’s a solid choice; it’s charming and perfect for summertime.

Oh by the way, that whole America/Japan thing is also a big part of the affair here, which is especially important to note considering the “cyber pearl harbor” comment from the first paragraph…I’ll stop, you get the idea, watch the movie.

Rating: 8/10

Summer Wars is available on Blu-Ray and DVD.

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