I watched the Eden of the East TV series a while ago, but
it was a while before I got around to first spending the money for
both follow-up movies and then actually sitting down to watch them.
Having finally done so, while the overall series (meaning the
combination of TV and movies) was certainly entertaining and
well-produced, I can’t say I ended up being happy with how it came
together. On general principle I’m not a fan of “concept”
stories—things (usually seinen manga or anime, it seems) based on
some contrived set of rules and/or conspiratorial power structure
designed to function as an allegory, like, say, Death Note with its
notes, Eden of the East with its Seleção game, Gantz with what
it is, or, to a slightly lesser extent Code Geas with its geases or
Kaiji with its gambling thing. I’m obviously in the minority,
since those things seem to tend toward exceedingly popular, and I
do like them sometimes, I’m just not fond of the base structure.
So, that was a strike against Eden of the East based on concept
alone—near-magical phones given to twelve apparently random people
dubbed Seleção (because these things always have to have some
random terminology) by someone mysterious that allow them to
request just about anything and get it, limited only by a total
budget of ten billion yen. How do they work? Why do
they work? Who is behind it all? Watch, and they just
might get around to telling you. Or not. Spoiler: On
the plus side, the show and particularly the movies do a good job
of having the characters work quite hard to pull back the curtain,
find the wizard, and break the game. They eventually expose a
lot of what’s going on behind the scenes and do, in fact, mess it
up pretty badly. On the negative (again, spoiler), the story is set
in the very near future and mostly goes out of its way to be very
realistic, except they never even slightly attempt to explain how
the mechanisms they establish to be behind it all occasionally
perform acts that are functionally reality manipulation. They show
us specifically that they’re big supercomputers and have to use
hacking—including tapping into the characters’ own Eden system—to
do things. No problem so far. Mind-wipe programs,
getting pretty extremely sci-fi, but again, the implication at the
end is that that worked because the originator implanted something
in them to enable that as part of the endgame. But
occasionally you have things like making the wheel fall randomly
off a truck driving down the highway with almost no premeditation
or transforming somebody’s clothes into hand grenades while sitting
in the back of a taxi cab—things that you simply cannot hand-wave
away as anything but manipulating reality. I was hoping they would
at least give a nod to that at the end, but, nope, nothing at all.
That really annoyed me, especially since it really wasn’t
necessary to the plot—they could have kept it to a slightly more
realistic level and never brought the questions into it in the
first place, and it wouldn’t have hurt the story at all or made
getting the characters from point A to point B any more difficult.
Getting back on track, the TV series was a good balance of fun,
adventure, conspiracy theory, entertaining characters, and bits of
action. The budget was obviously huge, the production values
are through the roof, and it even has actual Americans voicing the
walk-on roles when the characters are in the US at the
beginning—no ridiculously unconvincing English accents in sight.
It also has about the best hook you can picture—an
about-to-graduate-from-college Japanese tourist runs into a
completely naked guy with a funny-looking phone, a pistol, and
amnesia standing in front of the White House. The Secret
Service is not amused. That’s hitting the ground running in
the right way, and while it isn’t quite that off-the-wall for the
most part, it does maintain plenty of momentum right up to the end.
But that’s the problem: It starts to set up what could have been a
series-finale, but the “game” isn’t over yet, the villains are
still on the loose, and they haven’t even identified several of the
participants. Then they drop the lead-in for an obvious
sequel to follow through. Second season, no problem—plenty
left to do, lots of potential excitement. Except, oh wait, there
isn’t a second season, there are two movies instead. Not side
stories, two movies instead of a second season. Well, now I’m
feeling a little bit ripped off having to buy two movies instead of
a big juicy chunk of TV for about the same price (probably less at
Funimation’s price for big-name shows like this), but oh well, I
can live with that. The first movie, King of Eden, feels
exactly like the TV series—same visuals, same
quality of animation, same writing, same storytelling style.
That’s not really a complaint—the TV series was so
expensive-looking and polished that it easily works as theatrical
animation, and the speed and mood being so similar made it segue
seamlessly from one to the other instead of feeling like “Okay, now
we’re in a movie, everything is different.” And then it ends on a
cliffhanger that feels, frankly, like the halfway point of a movie
or a mid-season finale. Like, basically, they had one movie
worth of plot but split it into two to milk it for more money. Or
really, like they had about six more episodes worth of plot but
mashed them into a couple of movies instead for the same reason.
But, hey, let’s see what the second movie, Paradise Lost, can
do. Not all that much, it turns out. It’s a much lower-key movie,
focusing more on Takizawa’s backstory and finally finding out who
the man behind the game is, which was welcome—I’m always happy to
see emotional drama and answered questions—but it still feels like
it leaves out several important logistical points that I wanted
answered. Mostly, though, was the end—instead of a big, flashy
finale, like the TV series ended with, or a somewhat flashy finale,
like the first movie, it puts a low-key period at the end, then
adds two more periods and a question mark. I understand that a
story about how to save Japan can’t have a clean ending—that’s
fine—but it’s unsatisfying, open-ended, and predictably sets up a
sequel, if they feel like making one. A lot of the series, and
particularly the second movie, was about either piecing together
who Takizawa was, or rebuilding his character from nothing.
Then it ends up deciding not to really commit to anything—he
remains more of a symbol than a person. And in a series where
the rest of the cast felt quite human and real, that really stuck
out—his motivations never did end up coming together as part of a
coherent person, which was annoying to me. But that wasn’t my real
beef with the whole thing, which comes back to the title up there,
Fridge Rage. Fridge
Brilliance and Fridge
Horror (warning: those are TVTropes links—if you
click through and waste half your day, I’m not responsible) are
well known—when you watch something, and then, a while later,
you’re getting something out of the fridge, and it suddenly hits
you, “Wait, that was brilliant!” Or some
fact about the story that you hadn’t realized before suddenly
clicks into place after you’ve finished watching it and you realize
that that makes the whole thing horrifying. Well, there may be a
proper trope name for it (I’m not going to burn a day of my life
finding out), but I’ll add my own Fridge Rage to that—what happens
to me when I watch something that I more or less enjoy, but then a
while later (in my case usually laying in bed that night) I’m
sitting there thinking about it and suddenly I realize that
something about it really cheeses me off. An easy example would be
Howl’s Moving Castle—it’s easy to get swept up in the magic while
watching it, but the more I thought about it afterward, the angrier
I got that it was such a narrative mess. Well, Paradise Lost is a
prime case of Fridge Rage. The movie was a bit disappointing
for its anti-climax and lack of exposition, but while actually
watching it I was more or less enjoying it. Then, a while later, it
hit me: You know what? Those two movies were a
total cop-out. They set up this big, fancy
conspiracy and multiple antagonistic goals, had one big, indirect,
flashy showdown in the TV series, then set it up for an even bigger
showdown in what should have been a next season. And then
they cranked out two movies that, instead of following through, did
essentially nothing with that, and ended by
saying “Whelp, good show, that was fun, let’s call it a draw!” and
then functionally hitting the reset button on the main characters
yet again. Or the whole subplot about Takizawa
being installed as the son of the former Prime Minister. It
spends one and a half movies setting it up, then does absolutely
nothing with it, one way or the other—it ends up being irrelevant
to the plot and just sort of tossed aside. You could argue that it
was all a backhanded message—we look like enemies, but really our
goals are the same, and who we were doesn’t matter, or
something like that—but even if it were true, that’s not much of
an excuse. You’re talking about a movie that people either
payed money to go sit in a theater and watch or, in my case, payed
around fifteen bucks to own on blu-ray and got a complete non-end
out of. And in reality, it has all the hallmarks of writers who
either didn’t know how to pull together another big-bang finale, or
didn’t have the time and budget to do so, and opted to just call it
a day, throw something open-ended at the viewers, and go home
instead. Again, Fridge Rage. Also, that totally did not have to be
two movies. The second movie was paced very leisurely,
which I have no issue with in general, but could have easily been
trimmed up a bit in order to add it to the first movie, in which
case the whole thing wouldn’t have felt like such a rip-off—at
least there would have been a semi-finale in the film that way, and
I wouldn’t have payed twice for one movie’s worth of story. No, six
episodes worth of story, because that’s what these two movies
really are, and I want the other six episodes in the season. Not
saying I wouldn’t recommend the series as a whole—it’s still
overall a lot of fun, and the TV half of it was roundly
entertaining in all but a few spots—but do not come expecting a
satisfying end of any sort, or even much of a climax at
all.
