天下制覇

Now kill Gwen Stacey.

I decided against finishing the MB chapter this week and this is the slowest day with Aria being the only show. I've got too much to do this afternoon.

Impressions:

There is some truly bizarre direction going on here, both visual and in the composition. More than once, characters stand in the hail of automatic fire, confident that the writers have their backs. A convoluted Rube Goldberg sequence where one character snipes a crane release-lever on a speeding boat so it snags a random chunk of fence on the side of the canal and rips it out in order to provide a character with a swing at arm level exactly where she standing straight into the… boat cockpit (?)… we've overshot "cool", and are pushing past "ridiculous" as well. And yet, it wasn't even the most incomprehensible piece of direction. That would be at the very start, where she's dreaming about fighting the titular character with their feet locked together, she starts crackling with electricity, and then falls over forward into apparently a Psycho Crusher. From a foot away. It's a good thing that camera was about 6 inches away, because that might've looked incredibly stupid if you could actually see what was happened instead of just looking extremely stupid. Also, her power is seemingly magically sticky fingers, as she's able to turn off a car and remove the keys, while being hit by that car. Which she immediately shrugs off. Oh right, almost forgot that in this setting, their clothes stop bullets, are body tight, light enough to be worn by girls that weigh 35 pounds, and are also parachutes. So of course, massive blunt force trauma is no sweat. 

Probably the most shocking thing is how few CGI vehicles there were, especially considering how much random CGI crap there was in the original series. That should also give you a good idea of what I consider the high points of the episode. While the action itself is a bit better directed and animated than some of the other low end 'action' 'comedies', to stretch both terms, the visuals otherwise tend a bit oddward. Heavy shadows, claustrophobic camera angles from the chin, cuts to the 'cute' chibi style for jokes in the middle of its action… Well, it's better than trying absolutely nothing at all, but standing out because you're doing things that confuse provides only talking points for "things not to do."

Next Episode:

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