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Sunday, December 13, 2020

Steamboy (2015)

There are a lot of pluses and minuses that come about when you live in a household with a widely varied taste in film, and sometimes you end up with a steam punk anime film that you most certainly would not have picked out. 

This is a noisy, eventful and in my mind pretty unsuccessful venture into Victorian-era science fiction, animated by a modern Japanese master, of Akira fame Katsuhiro Otomo. It's like H. G. Wells and Jules Vernes strangely modern yet dated space age ideas meet anime.  The story follows three generations of a British family involved in a technological breakthrough involving steam, which the movie considers the 19th-century equivalent of nuclear power. There may be possibilities here, but they're lost in the extraordinary boredom of a long third act devoted almost entirely to loud, pointless and repetitive action.  The bottom line is that there are bad guys and worse guys, and sometimes they shift as the movie grinds to a destructive end.  The animation in incredible.
 

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