The Sky Crawlers

While it doesn’t sound like a normal thing to say about a Mamoru Oshii film, watch The Sky Crawlers for the air to air combat sequence eye candy. They’re cool, worth waiting for, and serve as anchors for the exploration in the film. However, from a director with a reputation of thoughtful films, The Sky Crawlers doesn’t seem that well thought out (or I just don’t get it). It felt like another half-empty bag of cynicism about modern life, which if it believed in it’s own premise, the world within the premise couldn’t exist.

[Most this post winds up being a tangent].

The Sky Crawlers takes the view that people need enemies, that their very nature needs and thus creates conflict. In order to maintain peace that the world somehow achieved, “the world” agreed to let two companies fight a fake perpetual war to maintain that peace. Essentially, these companies are gladiators, or sports teams to sate the masses need for conflict.

As if wars arise from arbitrary human desire and having a proxy war would remove their advent. Wars don’t arise from blood lust and the desire for conflict. Wars are always fought over resources and the reality is resources are finite. No proxy war can supply the resource in shortage that causes war to erupt. Disregard the logistical impossibility of an infinitely resourced world needed for such a unified agreement to exist, the true stupidity of the perpetual war system is it believes one can create an artificial system to regulate peace out of a belief that people need misery and doesn’t address the core driving principle of life which creates those conflicts — securing resources. Even in an artificial and non-essential situation like a baseball game, both sides are fighting over a limited resource. There is only one victory available for both teams on the field and their whole reason for being, including the fans, is to secure that resource. We may enjoy the conflict, but it isn’t what drives us. A never ending game or war would be constant conflict, but would bore or frustrate us right quick, so a fake perpetual war could never keep the peace, because the goal is securing the resource and the conflict is the means of procurement, not the desired result. A perpetual war denies the wanted resource. People fight over real resources and the fake war can never supply that resource. Also, the only way the planet would unite is if there was another faction that was a bigger threat to resources than anyone else on earth.

Actually, all you have to do is look at the Israeli conflict. It’s essentially been a perpetual war. How many wars occurred during that half century plus and counting? We’ve had 24 hour news for half of that time, so we can find outlets for the supposed need for conflict. Also, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan didn’t curtail Russian desire to storm into Georgia. Doesn’t seem like war prevents much war. The inane setup of The Sky Crawlers is about as well thought out as Ikki Tousen or Koihime Muso. Pretty much anything you want to glean about human nature with regard to conflict from The Sky Crawlers is about as useful as what you’d get from Koihime Muso.

Fortunately, The Sky Crawlers is not a movie about war. The story uses fighter pilots as interesting office workers to level critique at the emptiness of modern life and us ignorant zombies who grow up in it. Day in, day out, they punch in, do their thing, days blend together as we twitter away. People come and go, and are fairly interchangeable since the new guy seems a hell of a lot like the old guy! This makes sense, since jobs descriptions have requirements and companies look to fill the square hole with a square peg. With few exceptions, it really doesn’t matter who you are in the end as long as you have the skill-set to perform. That is unless you do something about it, which the world doesn’t really encourage.

All that said, I actually enjoyed The Sky Crawlers and found it worth watching and thinking about. Everything in it is so detailed, vague, and applicable to any cynicism we might harbor about present day life that it’s ripe for mental self pleasure trying to navigate through it all. This makes The Sky Crawlers the best gateway into being entertained by Mamoru Oshii. I also found the structure of the plot interesting to see unfold and the aerial combat rocked, meaning it’s possible to be entertained during the film as well as enjoying the afterglow of the mental self-pleasure of sorting it all out. I mean you could really go off for a thousand words about memory and the lack thereof in the the main characters and then try and create a parallel or extract a commentary about our world from it, but it wouldn’t have that much to do with the movie. It’s fantasy service for a different crowd.