Review
STEAMBOY
Featuring the voices of Anna Paquin, Patrick Stewart and Alfred Molina
Directed by Katsuhiro Otomo
Opens Friday, April 15
Check listings
Victorian London gets a memorable thrashing in the meticulously designed though ultimately disappointing new anime feature by Akira director Katsuhiro Otomo. Set during London’s Great Exhibition of 1866, Steamboy is a period piece of sorts. In Otomo’s reimagining of the steam age, technology has advanced far beyond what it managed in our reality. The elaborate series of pipes, pistons and gears now power tanks, gliders, airships and even a giant tower with massive destructive capabilities.
Ray (voiced by Anna Paquin in the apparently gender-neutral dub) is the son and grandson of inventors who have developed a powerful new energy source, the Steamball. When one is mysteriously delivered into Ray’s care, he is pursued by several sinister gents who hope to exploit the invention. Most sinister of all is an American company that uses the Great Exhibition as the demonstration site for its new steam-powered war machines, including a battalion of armoured Steam-troopers. All this tumult does not bode well for the Crystal Palace.
Unfortunately, Steamboy’s breathlessly paced storyline eventually trips the movie up, becoming too hectic and confusing to satisfy as a kid-friendly adventure film. Yet it’s consistently fascinating for its designs. A science-fiction fantasy wrought in brick and iron, this may rate as the first work in a new movie genre: Dickensian cyberpunk. The film’s political theme is also unusually overt – Otomo links technological advancement with the relentless drive to create newer, better weapons. Ray is shocked to discover that the noble aspirations of scientists and inventors can be so easily perverted.
"Science is power," his father tells him in a Darth Vader-like monologue, "pure power." Caught between an imminent war between Britain and America, Ray realizes that both sides are without scruples. Thus does apocalypse become inevitable. Luckily for the viewer, no director blows up stuff with as much enthusiasm or ingenuity as Otomo. Even so, Steamboy lacks a moment as indelible as the one in Metropolis – the future-noir 2001 anime written by Otomo and directed by Rintaro – when the sound of mass destruction is suddenly replaced by Ray Charles’s "I Can’t Stop Loving You." Alas, the Great Exhibition is not the place for R and B unless that stands for rubble and bombardment. |
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