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I wonder if there's enough time left to wrap up all the dangling plot lines: What is her mom doing now? Who tried to kill/kidnap Marika in the first episode? Who is backing the pirate hunting ship? Who is Iron Beard? What really happened to her father? What are Kane and Misa hiding? Will Marika and Chiaki ever show their true feelings for each other? (OK, probably not, but I can dream...)
Posted by: Siergen at Thu Jun 14 20:06:46 2012 (PuIGa)
After the success of the Transformers and Twister franchises, Hasbro and Universal looked around for some other Hasbro property to monetize. They inexplicably skipped over the cubist masterpiece that could have been Connect 4 The Motion Picture and went with Battleship.
Although the concept is dubious in the extreme, this film is surprisingly entertaining. Imagine what would happen if Irwin Allen and Ishiro Honda had collaborated and had Jerry Bruckheimers special effects staff. THIS! Seriously, it's a late '50s Toho epic with a disaster movies plot structure.
Taylor Kitsch and Japanese A-Lister Tadanobu Asano are the defacto leads playing two naval officers trying to deal with the alien threat. The film puts both the USN and JMSDF in a really good light. Though they get cut to pieces the survivors use their wits and behave in a fairly intelligent manner. My one complaint was Kitsch's character, who was such a screw up at the beginning that it beggers belief he would have made it that far. On the other hand his getting it together is handled pretty well.
The films effects are pretty good , either a lot more practical effects were used than is the norm or the CGI has gotten a lot better. There are surprises, a couple of obligatory "OH NO WAY!"moments and some unlikely coincidences but amazingly, no glaring plot holes.
This film is by no means art, but is rather better than most. I quite enjoyed it.
I watched two more episodes of Mysterious Girlfriend X.
Good grief this is an odd show.
It's wacky.
It's quirky.
It's gross.
Then this happens...
More importantly, a bit after that happens Urabe makes a pronouncement...
Which, in the context of the episode is really disturbing.
Possibilities:
1: SHE'S AN ALIEN
2: Souvlaki keeps a log of these things and she secretly read it.
3: She's a witch.
4: Souvlaki will soon discover that his quiet high-school life is shattered when Urabe reveals that he has been chosen to pilot a GIANT ROBOT.
Three episodes in, laughs are still outnumbering gag reflexes, but WTFs are catching up to both. I am now quite thoroughly intrigued.
UPDATE: Mauser is doing an in-depth play-by-play and discussion for each episode of this madness. The first installment is here. (spoiler alert)
Leadership can be thankless.
Even if one does everything right...
Even if one has a superb staff, excellent kit, a clever and thoroughly solid plan that one executes admirably...
The enemy ALWAYS gets a vote...
Oh my.
Someone is hunting pirates.
Marika, while juggling her various responsibilities, comes up with a cunning plan to deal with both the ships legal issues (to maintain their Letter of Marque they need to do something piratical in the near future) as well as the issue at hand.
In a nutshell, She gets the insurance company to hire the BentenMaru to escort...another privateer, and its escorts, thereby increasing the available firepower in hopes of deterring or trapping whoever is hunting pirates.
Unfortunately, the threat is... quite unexpected.
Whatever they are dealing with has what appears to be a technological advantage measured in decades and more firepower than some of the fleets we've seen in previous episodes.
Then THIS happens...
What..in the hell? Why is the Narrator here?
A couple of questions/observations:
It is revealed in this episode that most of us were wrong about BentenMaru's place on the scale of pirates...far from being near the top in firepower, it turns out that she is near the bottom and very nearly too weak to have been granted a letter. This seems significant since it indicates that S.O.M. is only granting Letters of Marque to substantial naval vessels. This dovetails into the revelation that...
Stone has an impressive little fleet built around Big Catch. I gather that these 3 other vessels (Which look to be armed merchants) fall under Stones' Letter of Marque. Silver Fox had two support vessels as well, this ads two new dimensions to the privateers:
First: they are a more formidable force than the number of active letters would indicate.
Second, the operating costs for stones little flotilla must be huge. One wonders what jobs he has been doing that allow him to finance this.
I do wonder if the firepower rating of the vessels mentioned above is aggregate firepower...that is, is the BentenMaru ranked near the bottom because she has no other ships under contract?
In the previews the crazy masked narrator appears to be a hologram...I wonder if his ship is
I'm wondering if the Pirate Hunter ship is from the Galactic Empire. Perhaps they are tired of the grey area that the pirates represent. A related thought...are the Galactic Empire aliens?
Is the crazy masked narrator allied or opposing the pirate hunter....or is this some sort of false flag operation?
What is Kane hiding?
Numerous people have remarked about the methodical pacing of Bodacious Space Pirates.
That pacing really comes to the fore in this installment. After last weeks action packed previews and the episodes rather jarring teaser the story switches gears abruptly to move at a quite leisurely clip.
Marika formulates her plan, there are
character expositions and various background points are clarified. In any other show a build up this gradual would drag unbearably, yet here, every little bit of what seems at first glance to be padding is structure. Every bit of it matters, if not to the plot, then to the characterizations.
When it finally happens, the action is that much more satisfying.
Of course, I'm not sure if my high opinion of this kids show speaks more negatively of US television or me.
It's not that Bentenmaru is almost too weak to be granted a Letter of Marque. It's that ships weaker than Bentenmaru got destroyed or their crews gave up.
