An impressive execution, but unfortunately, one held back by a premise that’s fundamentally flawed in more ways than one. Summer Wars is a perfect example of how anime is not immune to the Western trend of incorporating modern technology into the core plot, without caring whether the things done with that technology even remotely make sense.
As such, this review will mainly focus on those parts of the story, because I think other people have already covered the other story elements better than I could. THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE CORE STORYLINE. DO NOT READ FURTHER IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE SPOILED.
At the beginning of Summer Wars, we are introduced to “Oz”, which appears to be a very advanced social network that nearly everyone uses, and is very important for daily life. Alright; the parallels being drawn between Oz, current social networks, companies like Google, and social projects like Second Life are fairly obvious. However, as the story develops, this analogy progressively falls further and further apart.
One of the first things we learn about Oz is that most companies and governments maintain a presence in Oz, many taking it as far as having virtual offices inside it. Again, the parallel being drawn here between Oz and today’s Facebook, Twitter, etc. is obvious. However, Summer Wars takes this farther by revealing that not only is Oz used as a public presence on the Internet, employees’ Oz accounts are directly used to perform the actions that their jobs involve – And, over the course of the story, that this not only includes relatively innocent things like the control functions for plumbing in major cities, but also core functions of a navigation system run by the U.S. Air Force (in this case, GPS), and the core control functions of an autonomous interplanetary probe (more on this later).
This immediately raises gigantic red flags. Where has the rest of the Internet gone? Why are these systems, the misuse of which could cause massive damage and loss of life, directly accessible via the public Internet to begin with, let alone something like Oz, which is (presumably – I don’t believe it’s explicitly stated) run by a private company? In the real world, the person to seriously suggest exposing the core functions of a business, let alone a military project, to Google or Facebook would get laughed out of the building.
Continuing to a less erroneous, but still important point – The entire plot twist involving the interplanetary probe should seem clearly off to anyone with a basic understanding of orbital mechanics. The final stage of an unmanned interplanetary craft, which has orbited the Sun and been recaptured into a low Earth orbit, should have only the bare minimum delta-V left to safely return to the surface. This means only being to touch down along the plane of its orbit, not anywhere on the surface it damn well pleases. Along with a conveniently provided countdown, this should’ve immediately narrowed down its potential landing area, and rendered that part of the plot basically a non-issue.
To finish off this review, I really don’t want to sound like a grumpy old man; I’m just thoroughly annoyed by works of fiction that attempt to incorporate modern-day technology but completely ignore whether what they do with it makes any sense. Especially so when the problems ought to be immediately obvious even to someone with little or no technical background.
Until now, I had naively believed that anime was at least somewhat immune to this phenomenon that crops up very often in Western TV and cinema, but it appears that I was mistaken.
