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avramI saw Steamboy with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bugsybanana last night. The subtitled director’s cut playing at the Landmark Cinema, not the dubbed and trimmed-down version showing at the AMC. Not that I knew that going in; I chose the venue because I felt like having some Katz’s Deli matzo ball soup.
It’s a Katsuhiro Otomo movie, so plenty of impressive visuals and lots of the old explodo. And it’s steampunk, so you get your FDA recommended allowance for the year of pipes, gears, and other industrial goodies. I had a bit of trouble figuring out what most of the character’s motivations were. Not the protagonist, young Ray Steam himself, the movie does a good enough job of dangling obvious plot carrots in front of him, and swapping them out as needed. And one set of bad guys, the O’Hara Corporation, American arms dealers, yeah, they want to make money by showing off their new weapons to various nations of the world, and so they want to, um, destroy The Great Exhibition. OK, pretty straightforward, but then we’ve got a host of associate enemy/allies. Robert Stephenson, who seems to be representing state power over corporate power. And Ray’s father and grandfather, who spend an unfortunate amount of time in naïve philosophical arguments about the purpose of science.
Hey, has there ever been a major steampunk work that really engaged with the fact that the 19th century was a hotbed of labor activity? Britain made labor unions legal in 1832, the Tolpuddle Martyrs were arrested in 1834, you had the Chartists (some of you may remember them from Freedom & Necessity by Steven Brust and Emma Bull), and in 1864 Marx organized what would later become the First International. Imagine a steampunk version of the fight over the Paris Commune of 1871. (Hm, maybe I need to reread The Difference Engine.)
bugsybanana last night. The subtitled director’s cut playing at the Landmark Cinema, not the dubbed and trimmed-down version showing at the AMC. Not that I knew that going in; I chose the venue because I felt like having some Katz’s Deli matzo ball soup. It’s a Katsuhiro Otomo movie, so plenty of impressive visuals and lots of the old explodo. And it’s steampunk, so you get your FDA recommended allowance for the year of pipes, gears, and other industrial goodies. I had a bit of trouble figuring out what most of the character’s motivations were. Not the protagonist, young Ray Steam himself, the movie does a good enough job of dangling obvious plot carrots in front of him, and swapping them out as needed. And one set of bad guys, the O’Hara Corporation, American arms dealers, yeah, they want to make money by showing off their new weapons to various nations of the world, and so they want to, um, destroy The Great Exhibition. OK, pretty straightforward, but then we’ve got a host of associate enemy/allies. Robert Stephenson, who seems to be representing state power over corporate power. And Ray’s father and grandfather, who spend an unfortunate amount of time in naïve philosophical arguments about the purpose of science.
Hey, has there ever been a major steampunk work that really engaged with the fact that the 19th century was a hotbed of labor activity? Britain made labor unions legal in 1832, the Tolpuddle Martyrs were arrested in 1834, you had the Chartists (some of you may remember them from Freedom & Necessity by Steven Brust and Emma Bull), and in 1864 Marx organized what would later become the First International. Imagine a steampunk version of the fight over the Paris Commune of 1871. (Hm, maybe I need to reread The Difference Engine.)
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Date: 2005-03-22 07:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-12 04:31 pm (UTC)At a certain point, I decided the answer was "no". A "no" underlined, boldfaced, and then vandalized with little bits of graffiti by the writers saying "nope nope nope. Make sense? Look! A monkey!"
Yes, I enjoyed the movie.