Summer Wars Review (Spoilers)

I’ve talked a lot Hollywood and comics but let me switch gears to an anime I’ve watched recently watched.

Released in 2009, Summer Wars is about everyone being on the metaverse being responsible for all our lives until it gets hacked by a rough AI. The movie is directly inspired by Digimon’s Our War Game and likely share some elements from John Badham’s WarGames. This is a movie I discover last year around the time I tripped upon and watched Your Name, another great anime.

I’ve only watched the English dub in its entirety and only the first act of the Sub. So I can’t speak for all differences. That being said, they’re likely pretty inconsequential to the plot given how much Japanese culture is central to the film.

The movie hybrid of action meets slice-of-life. Funny enough, this is kinda how I wanted to approach my stories. Kenji, a talented math student, is asked by Netsuki, the daughter Shinohara family, to visit her home for a quick job. That job turns out to be pretending to be her boyfriend in front of her family for Sakae’s 90th birthday. Kenji struggles to come to grips with pulling off the bluff but eventually agrees on the condition that it’s temporary.

The first day goes relatively smoothly despite Kenji’s reluctance. It isn’t until he is sent and decodes hex by hand that things start to derail spectacularly. He is woken the very next morning to discover that he accidentally decrypted into Oz’s security algorithm was framed for it because Love Machine, the rough AI, stole his account and now has complete control.

Since I never got to meeting the family in the sub after I got my hands on the dub, I can say that the only key difference is Kenji wanted to a representative of Japan. The dub focuses more on him wanting to go out on a date.

The Battle for Oz

When Love Machine gained access to Oz, it became the new legit owner and enabled tournament mode on the entire virtual world. Because it can take other people’s accounts, he changes forms, grows stronger and take spawn the very avatars those people created. However, it’ll only do this when provoked and is otherwise more interested in wrecking havoc on Oz.

As Kenji tries to uncover the truth before he is discovered and (briefly) arrested, he meets Kazuma, Netsuki’s teenage cousin behind who is behind famous King Kazma. He is pretty much an outcast in his family because he spends all of his time at the computer. Kazuma loses the fight and almost gets his taken stolen by Love Machine when Kenji’s new account saves King Kazma in Oz.

It turns out Wabisuke, the illegitimate son of Sakae’s late husband, stole the family’s money so he could go to America. He wanted to make it back by creating Love Machine for the government Department of Defence. He had no idea it would be live tested on Oz itself. As you can imagine, Sakae was royally pissed and used her last remaining energy on calling everyone in charge of public services with a rotary phone to hold up the fort as infrastructure began to collapse around them. She passed away the following day she had a pacemaker that was connected to the network causing the family to be split on what to do.

While one half keeps Sakae’s body cool until things return to normal, the other aid Kenji and Kazuma by battling Love Machine from within. It’s here we discover that one family works for IT and just happens to have a spare supercomputer while another brings over telecom satellites from the Japanese military to remain connected that’s all powered by a freakin’ boat.

King Kazma is a lot stronger in the fight and narrowly avoids to defeat by Love Machine. They manage to trap it inside their supercomputer and begin to flood interior. Unfortunately, their plan is undermined when the large ice needed to cool it is used for the grandmother and it winds up breaking free and absorbing all of Oz’s accounts and taking King Kazma’s along with it. Meanwhile, Love Machine sent a satellite on a crash course with a random nuclear power facility before deciding to change its course for Netsuki’s family.

Before the main conflict, some people in the family played Koi-Koi, including Sakae. Netsuki, who had an emotional meltdown after her grandmother’s death, organizers her family together to play a game of Koi-Koi against Love Machine. They realized it likes to play games but can’t win on it’s own, as alluded to earlier. She decides and her family their accounts in order all of Oz’s back. After almost losing the bet in the end, the last remaining accounts that weren’t stolen bet there’s as well and she wins.

10/10 Would Jump into Oz Again

Okay, maybe not exactly 10/10. I just wanted to make that joke. That being said, I do love it and would watch it over and over. It is certainly a 8 or 9 out of 10, if I were to give it a score. I fast racked a bit some of this review just because this movie is about as dense as Netsuki’s family tree.

The fact that the creators of Love Machine and King Kazma, receptively, are both members of the same family is just insane. And yet, my own extended family is just as bonkers that I can argue that’s pretty much truth in television. It adds to mystery and there was even like a five second foreshadow that Wabisuke was indeed the creator. The real mystery is why he did it.

I recently lost my grandmother a few years ago. In fact, I’ve lost a few grandparents in the last decade due to cancer. It was really nice to see the movie take time to pause and pay respect for the character’s own grandmother. Even though the family is initially split into two factions in response to her death, they are still united in the end.

The fact that this movie is very critical of governments and their use of the military is probably why it got brushed under the rug in the west. I only became somewhat aware of the movie through King Kazma fan art.