Moonlight Mile Review
July 23rd, 2008 by Bad Jew
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Reviewed by: Bad Jew |
The manga PlanetES (not the anime, we don’t talk about the anime) has really affected my life. My job is to study scientists. I work on ways to help them share knowledge more effectively. One of the reasons I do this is that PlanetES made me realize that even though I suck at math and can’t be a real engineer, maybe I can still make the future come a bit sooner by helping scientists work better. So, I’m a big fan of PlanetES, and I often find myself turning to it when I need inspiration to write for another 18 hours straight.
Now, some of our more astute readers might have realized that this is a review of Moonlight Mile, not PlanetES. PlanetES was reviewed by me (quite hilariously, if I do say so myself) previously.
The reason I bring up PlanetES is that in many ways, Moonlight Mile is pretty much PlanetES’ prequel. PlanetES is about a world where the moon has been colonized by corporations extracting precious helium-3 from the plentiful moon dust. Moonlight Mile is about the beginning of this process an (implied) 20-50 years from now, when mankind stops looking at space as the final frontier, and starts looking at it as a new place to mine in.
Let’s get one thing straight. The characters in this aren’t your father’s astronauts. Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, was not only a test pilot and a confirmed fighter ace, but he had a freaking PhD from MIT. The man could run a five-minute mile while solving differential equations in his head. He also sucker punched a lunar-landing conspiracy nut at the age of 70.
The main characters of this show - Jack Lostman and Gorou Saruwatari - are macho superman who want to conquer the moon while having sex with every woman they see on the way. In the first scene, the climb Mount Everest, symbolically crushing Mother Gaia. There is nothing left but to go to the moon and crush Mother Luna.
Now, normally I’d make reference to the fact that Everest here is an obvious phallic symbol, used in order to show Lostman and Gorou’s turgid masculinity. But the point is well made by the show itself, because later in the first episode, Gorou strips down in a bar and shows off his own phallus [I don’t think my editor allows me to use the word ‘penis.’ But, I just did, I guess. Whoops.]. In the second episode, he has graphic sex in a crane’s control booth. I think I agree with John Mora, who argues that the women in this show are essentially just expendable sex toys to be used by Lostman and Gorou to show how manly they are. So yah, kids, this one is officially NC-17.
But how can our virile heroes get to space? Lostman takes the traditional route, joining the Navy and becoming a pilot in the hopes of becoming a NASA astronaut. This takes a while, since most shuttles now-a-days are filled with a mathematician, a different kind of mathematician, and a statistician studying the effects of Zero-G on tiny screws.
Gorou takes a different route - he becomes a construction worker. This is actually a really smart point on the part of the show. When corporations start traveling into space, they’re not going to need astronomy and geology PhDs, they’re going to need really smart people who can build stuff really quickly. Gorou, who has the ability to make a multi-story crane operate with the grace of a ballet dancer (while drunk and in-between having sex with cafeteria workers), is a perfect fit for this.
A lot like PlanetES, Moonlight Mile tries to do too much. It is simultaneously the story of Gorou and Lostman’s lives as they become astronauts in very different ways, a tale of corporate and government politics and conspiracies as the United States tries to exert control over the colonization of space, and a piece of speculative fiction about future energy policy. It goes off in too many directions and never develops any one particular plot line in a full way. There is no character development to speak of: Gorou and Lostman start off as ultra-macho men seeking adventure, and they end the show that way, too.
At the time of this writing, there was a second season of the show airing in Japan, so maybe that ends up giving the show time to flesh some things out. In particular, I think the sub-plot about the militarization of space has a lot of room for development.
So, plot-wise, Moonlight Mile makes an excellent prequel to PlanetES. But in other ways, it isn’t. PlanetES is, at its best, a gentle story of the place of love in a world of science and technology. Moonlight Mile has graphic sex scenes for no good reason.
I think there is some hope. The anime is actually based on a manga that’s 14 volumes and is still ongoing. If there is a just God, this will turn out to be just like what happened with PlanetES: an amazingly complex and well-written manga was turned into a fairly sub-par anime. But the manga hasn’t been picked up yet, and my Japanese language skills are limited to ordering for the bathroom at a restaurant, so I won’t know for a while.
The Moonlight Mile anime was released on North American DVD by ADV in late 2007/early 2008 (although Funimation owns it now), and there have been several excellent reviews and discussions of it on the interblogs since. As I mentioned earlier, John Mora over at Grump Factory had an excellent review where he discussed the total misogyny that pervades this show. One particularly interesting discussion of the show is from a blog on space development here that places Moonlight Mile in the context of the use the moon for helium-3 extraction. THAT Anime Blog and the Daily 49er also have some positive view of the show.
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Overview: The anime’s okay, but the graphic sex scenes are really weird and not needed. I hope to God the manga’s better. But whatever criticism I have about this show, I still clutched my “I heart space” plushie close to my chest while watching. You can, too…but not with my plushie, because I made it. 3.5 out of 5 stars.  |