movie: Push

Recently, I mentioned that I never seem to post about the movies I actually like anymore. So! A movie I mostly liked!

During WWII, the Nazis experimented on people to create superhumans with various psychic powers. The war ended, but the experiments didn’t. Today(ish) an organization called The Division controls most superhumans, and wants to get their hands on the rest. Nick’s father was killed by a Division agent when Nick was 10, and he’s been on the run ever since. He’s a telekinetic, but has little control over his powers because he’s never been trained. Meanwhile, The Division has been trying to create a drug to enhance the psychics’ powers, but every attempt results in a dead psychic. The only exception is Kira, a young telepath, who escapes after being injected. Linking them is Cassie, a 13-year-old with an unreliable ability to see the future, whose mother is the most powerful seer ever, and has been locked up by The Division for years.

Push’s take on superhumans is interesting, as does it’s ideas regarding gender roles in heroism. The characters with aggressive, action-y powers (mostly white men) are pretty much the tools of people with more passive, “secondary” powers (mostly women) and the two Damsels in Distress are pretty much the most powerful forces in that world. The more traditional heroic (and villainous) figures are more the weapons the real heroes use. Nick’s enmity with the agent who killed his father, which would normal be mentioned every 5 minutes, is almost a complete non-issue, and the posturing rivalry plotline is with Cassie and another seer. And, you know, actually kinda interesting. The movie also caters quite nicely to my kink for scruffy loners with cute wee snarky accessories. And there’s bonus Ming Na, Djimon Hounsou, and Joel Gretsch.

On the flipside, the movie tries and fails at something of a “superhero noir” and ends up just being painfully slow at times, and they try so hard to keep us guessing with Kira that her character is all over the place, and there’s never really anything solid to grab on to. And…ok, frankly, large chunks of the movie could be summed up as “an evil black man and a bunch of evil Chinese people chase quasi-heroic young white people through Hong Kong.” 

manga: Andromeda Stories Vol 1-3 (complete series)

This series has a cyborg swordswoman who is the sole survivor of her planet as the main action character, and an infant who throws rocks at birds to catch dinner and tames dragons. There is a high probability that a significant portion of the people reading this now know whether or not they want to read the series.

Andromeda Stories is a shoujo manga from 1980 about Sekrit Twins and the galactic robot apocalypse. For spoilery reasons, I am convinced that Kaori Yuki has every page of it memorized, despite the fact that her shoujo series bear little resemblance to this. And the “dinosaurs in space ships” dream at the beginning of Please Save My Earth is way more fun now. And it was already lots of fun!

The series kicks off with Princess Lilia of Ayodoya's marriage to Prince Ithaca of Cosmoralia, something that doesn’t sit well with her brother, Milan. Milan appears to be in love with Lilia. Along with every other male in the series less than a thousand years old. Going into this with almost no idea what it was about, I thought the series would be about a bizarre love triangle amidst the galactic robot apocalypse, especially once Ithaca was possessed by robots and insane. (Don’t worry, this happens fairly early, and is actually a relatively minor factor!) But no! Because then there were twins and royal twins are Very Very Bad and one was smuggled out of the city before it could be killed, and then the galactic robot apocalypse wiped out half the planet.

Or something. I was still going “Sekrit Twins! Sekrit Twins!” at that point, so I may have missed minor plot details..
There’s a lot of epic scifi action and (melo)drama packed into these three volumes. Many of the plot twists were standard fare for the genre, but it managed to never be predictable. There’s also a lot of bizarre plot twists and “OMG what did that really just happen?” plot bits, combining to make something both awesome and bizarre. There also seems to be a bit of a skewed take on classical myth at the core. In particular, I can’t help but draw some comparisons between Lilia and Helen, the Elder and Prometheus, and the twins with Athena and Apollo. I’ll let you learn for yourselves if the last is a gender-appropriate comparison. This series did make me question my crossdressing manga character radar a couple times.

In short: galactic robot apocalypse, Sekrit Twins, action infants, and cyborg swordswoman who is the sole survivor of her planet and is wandering the cosmos. All with manga hair from 1980!

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