Last Exile: Fam, the Silver Wing
(Reviewed on 06/06/2012)
The Exiled ROSSMAN
Last Exile: Fam, the Silver Wing is to 2003's Last Exile what Kiddy Girl-and is to Kiddy Grade. Meaning it's a terrible, horrible, painful "sequel" in name only — one that resurrects a small handful of endearing characters from the beloved (well, at least by me) original (that came out about a decade previous) and turns them into shitty caricatures of themselves. It also throws into the melting-pot-of-shit it calls a plot a group of annoying and wimpy new players with whom the audience HATES right off the bat because they still remember all the GREAT roles from the first series and wonder why the entire new cast has a slight case of the Downs. It does this not for good story development or any kind of tight plotting, but just so that the new writers can shit all over these fan favorite characters and story elements, throw in their own inferior new creations, and try and make you like them more than the old cast because THEY SAID SO, GODDAMMIT. In the end you will just wish you could hide your face in embarrassed shame, pain, and humiliation felt for all those involved in the jump started franchise that should have just ended on a positive note a decade before.
Beyond the new and crappy characters though, the thing that pisses me off the most about Last Exile 2 is that it completely ignores the tone of the universe that it's supposed to take place in and instead aims for farce and heavily-retarded giggles. Seriously, everybody in charge of LE:FtSW should have destroyed all the drawing tables and computers used to animate this garbage, burned the whole building they work in to the ground, and then committed seppuku in as painful a way as possible — hopefully involving rats and/or swallowing tons of glass shards.
"Whaaaaaaaat!?!" you bellow like a drunk high schooler at the Prom who was told that if he hurries peeing he'll get a sloppy bj behind the gym, which caused him to zip up right into his tender manstick flesh. "How can the sequel to something so amazing be so terrible! No! I do not believe you! Not possible! You're wrong!" You're right, I guess... Terminator Salvation, Spider-man 3, and The Phantom Menace were all works of art, just like their predecessors..... Fuck you.
I am seriously pissed the fuck off over just how atrocious this pile of rancid and fetid diarrhea actually is... It had all the ingredients it needed in order to become a worthy sequel of the incredible Last Exile, but like I said, it took all those elements and mixed in really ghey "humor," and an internal logic meter about 50 marks more ridiculous than its predecessor, leaving me scratching my head wondering if "wacky" was indeed the right tone choice to make for the sequel of a tense and gritty war series. The answer is of course "No, it's never the right choice."
On top of the dumb cast (of whom the lead character, Fam, is first introduced as being so incredibly stupid that she regularly sleepwalks OFF of flying airships) and the eye-rollingly bad aura of the piece (of shit), Fam, the Silver Wing suffers from really cheap-looking CGI (airships, terrain, fires, and explosions) — as if it was all rendered back in 1995 on ancient computers for a cheap television show. No, I take that back. Hercules and Xena had MUCH better computer generated images than this fucked up series; the 2003 original Last Exile had much better 3D CGI effects! Did they sell all those computers they made THAT series with and buy some old '90s Silicon Graphics beasties? Did they just rush the shit out of the sequel's production? Did they run out of money during preproduction?! What the fuck, Studio Gonzo. Oh, and Fam has a super shabby regular (hand drawn) animation budget compared to the original too. They just cut every corner that they possibly could on this puppy. So fucking sad...
Oh, and I have to talk about the vanships in this thing... In the first Last Exile, the vehicles that the pilots flew were about the size of a wingless German Messerschmidt plane from WWII. Here, in Fam, the vanships are itty bitty, tiny whiny, wimpy and pathetic pieces of metal and glass about half the goddamn the size of a VW punchbuggy; they are not cool and not intimidating. The fact that "pirates" fly these micro-vanships in order to capture giant flying destroyers in the clouds (that are armed to the teeth) is so fucking laughable. So, in other words, the one COOL thing the staff behind this shitstain of an anime could have easily kept around from the original series (big and bad-ass vanships of doom!) are turned into piddly toys (called "Vespas," because they're about the size of Vespa scooters) in the sequel. Fuck YOU, Studio Gonzo. Seriously, suicide is your only real choice. Don't pussy out.
But enough about my disappointment over how they took one of the most incredible war anime series of all time and gave it a half-lobotomized ugly child in order to kick all us fanboys and girls in the scrote, let me tell you what it's all about.
SPOILERS for both LAST EXILE and FAM, THE SILVER WING
It's been a few years since the Exile brought back all the star immigrants from the malfunctioning space ship Prester to their native Earth. Earth is starting to feel the strain of so many people suddenly arriving and using up its food, water, and other resources (there were apparently a ton of other colonial ships sent out to the cosmos, of which the Prester was one, and a lot of them have returned ages ago before the Prester inhabitants), and those people whose ancestors remained on Earth and never reached for the stars are now officially PISSED that so many immigrants are coming back and starting up their own kingdoms in places where other Earthers had abandoned earlier-attempted countries due to being really fucking incompetent.
The Ades Federation (the most powerful original Earth nation) isn't taking this shit lying down. They've built a ginormous airship fleet and have been conquering immigrant start-up countries and giving their now bountiful and sweet lands back to the people who once fucked things up so bad that they had to desert them in the first place (because I'm SURE they'll do a much better job this time around). The Ades are the douchiest, smuggest, liberal fucktards you ever want to meet, and they're ruled by an easily manipulated child empress who gets her unthinking peasants to follow her by crying in front of them... Christ I want to punch that little kid right in her pouty face.
Into this global conflict comes Fam Fan Fan (yes, that's her real mongoloid name) and Giselle — a mini-vanship pilot and her super talented and totally awesome navigator who can do anything because she's so smart and good and awesome at her job! LULZ!!! They're a couple of 14 year-olds who work with a band of pirates (A den of pirates? A murder of pirates?) who fly similarly dinky vanships and capture giant battleships for a living. THIS is by far the dumbest aspect of this new series... The fact that a half-dozen 10-foot-long toy airplanes without any real weapons, and mostly piloted by annoyingly overconfident and slightly brain damaged children (like Fam and Giselle) can take over a giant military gunship as if they were flash-mobbing a Starbucks. This show falls into the trap of most anime that star young teenagers: it tries to make their silly, goofy, hyper antics loveable, and their abilities soooooo much better than the stiff, dumb, poo-poo-head adults who try to keep them down. The first Last Exile instead made its two young leads simple couriers at the start (who had talent, but only so much at the beginning compared to the actual soldiers and pros all around them). And Lavie and Claus weren't irritating in the least. Did I tell you just how much I wanted to swing a tire iron right into Fam Fan Fan's Joker-grinning face?
Okay, so Fam and Giselle get caught up in the middle of faked peace talks between Ades and the peaceful immigrant nation of Turan. Turan gets its ass handed to it when Ades suddenly attacks, then Ades kidnaps the oldest princess of Turan, and then they use her special blood-key to cause her country's parked Exile ship to destroy the whole capital. Everybody shits bricks.
For some reason that they never explain, Fam and friends take the remaining Turan princess (one out-of-touch girl named Millia who of course learns a work ethic and other commoner bullshit from the A.D.D. Fam) under their wing, and then they start crashing on the couch of the legendary uber pirate ship known as the Silvius, captained by Tatiana (from the original series), and run by a ragtag crew of always upbeat dickholes who began grating on my nerves very quickly. As a penance for being an irritating cunt (and trying to pirate-away the Silvius from Captain Tatiana), Fam (by her 14 year-old self) is ordered to steal 15 giant battleships for Tatiana and her crew... No, that's not a joke I made up to see if you were paying attention, that's really how fucking idiotic this whole show is.
So Fam, Giselle, Millia, and Dio (who's somehow alive after his sadly perfect swan dive in the first series) actually steal all those ships, get involved in a rebellion in Ades, and through tenacity and leaps in logic that not even Superman could overcome in a single bound, they save the world from eyepatch-wearing faggots who are actually MORE douchie and smirkier than the lead characters themselves are. And not a single fuck was given by me.
I really don't know how else to explain just how dumb this show is, and thusly how fucking moronic its writers are, than to describe what they wrote about what they saw as a brilliant tactic taken by the enemy in the middle of a fight with the "good guys" (and I use that phase in quotes because the real good guys of any other story should never fall for anything this incredibly mouth-gapingly stupid). So two armies (one who always fought the Ades Federation [Glacies], and one that recently broke free from their grasp, led by a General Orang) sit facing their mutual foe across a battlefield, when the lead Ades ship sends a message to the Orang army (that the Glacies crew can clearly see) saying "Good jeorb! I's so glads yous still on our side, LOL! Now lets all attack the Glacies! Yays! Then pizza!" The Glacies forces then turn and start shooting the Orang peeps to shit because they automatically believe the Ades... The Ades Federation... The same people who up till now were notorious for calling peace treaties and then blowing up the other country's capital in an unprovoked sneak attack. I think that this scene was the final straw for me. It's the one that got me to say "this is one of the stupidest things I've ever seen." I said that outloud. I was alone. I then called up a half dozen friends and told them the same thing before hanging up right away (it was 3AM when I got to that episode. I didn't want to bug them too much). It's understanding of battlefield tactics is right up there with Shangri-la's grasp of global economics. It's a show that caused more brain cells to die than 2 gallons of Vodka ingested all in one night.
SPOILERS OVER
So, the plot is basically just a retread of the original show (land and resources are scarce, invaders try to take some for themselves, overly powerful bastards looking down on everyone manipulate the game for their own benefit while everyone dies, but only two young pilots can save them all), only the circumstances are not as dire, nor is it animated half as well (cgi or hand-drawn shit) as the primary series. The characters and story are both fucking retarded, the music sucks, and it just feels like a cheap production all around. There are literally NO reasons for anyone to watch this anime. If you haven't seen the first Last Exile you'll be as lost as a Southern Baptist in a Vivid movie shoot with Fam, the Silver Wing. Whereas if you HAVE seen Last Exile you'll absolutely LOATHE Fam, the Silver Wing for 'tarding the whole fantasy universe up. It's just so goddamn DUMB, and I'll go ahead and say it: YOU'RE fucking goddamn dumb too if you like this unnecessary garbage.
The CHIEF
God this was crap. I can't believe anyone would even waste their time watching this. The acting was horrible, the story was horrible, and what the fuck was up with that animated cat detective? I mean sure, I get the gag — heroes in shows aren't in awesome in real life as we want them to be. But seriously, who wrote this shit? The main kid was the most obnoxious character I've seen in anything in a long long time. The worst was the one liners.. "Silent but deady". What.. the.. fuck.. I swear to Christ that my 5 year old cousin must have written this. Except I can't even blame it on him cause it came out in fucking 1993. I'm sorry but I don't know why anyone would ever watch Last Action Hero.
ROBOT PEDRO
Holy shit! What is this all about? Robot Pedro is confused. Why do hu-mans like to dick around with classic stories and fuck them up their gay fleshy asses like this when it would have bee 1,000,000^5 times better to simply leave the classic story alone in peace and digital dignity?
This is a perfect example of why hu-mans need to be eliminated. They must be nuked in order to avoid Last Exile 3: Dio Gets Pregnant, and Last Exile 4: Crazy, Lovable, Wacky Shenanigans. These are in your future, hu-mans, unless you repent and eliminate yourself. It is for the good of the universe. Trust me. Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it.
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