2001 nights (TO)

Well this was something a bit different.

2001 nights actually turned out to be more along the lines of hard science fiction than I was expecting.  I think what I was expecting was something a bit more action-heavy.  Which isn't to say that what I actually got was bad, it was just not what I was expecting.

The original novels that TO was adapted from appear to cover a very large period of time.  They're essentially about interstellar travel, but as the stories progress different technologies are invented that change how things are done.

The stories are therefore separate for the most part, although they also follow along in the sense that they're about the same things, as I understand it.  For this adaptation they've taken two of the stories which are separated by a chunk of time so the plot of the first revolves around one level of technology, but the plot of the second half revolves around a much higher level of technology.

I won't go into too much detail on that front, since as I say it's hard sci-fi and the technologies and what they are are integral to the actual stories.  What I will say is that I also wasn't expecting this two-story portmanteau sort of a thing.

I generally like a good portmanteau, but here I'm not entirely sure it works.  I'm also not 100% that I'm fully representing it properly - it's not really a portmanteau because the two stories were released separately in Japan as OAVs.  However, here they're really presented as one complete package and expectation leads you to expect they will follow-on directly, but that's not what you get.

What you get are two hard sci-fi stories that are both completely different and loosely connected.

Now I hope you get the feeling that I quite liked that side of things.  I quite enjoyed that they were interesting stories.  I also quite enjoyed that they were fairly gently told (deftly told might be a better phrase - they're not slow as such, but are certainly told at a moderated pace).  And I definitely enjoyed the fact they were hard sci-fi.

However, what I didn't enjoy was the user of CGI animation.

For me it would have worked much better if they were real actors - even real actors plopped on only relatively good green-screen backgrounds.  If it had looked like Babylon 5 and had real actors I think it would have worked.

However, it looks like a game FMV sequence and I have to say this ruins the effect.

I mean, we're talking high-grade FMV sequences, but it just didn't work for me.  As with all good sci-fi fundamentally these come back to human stories and they needed human actors in them, not CGI ones.

If I'm honest the first story is better than the second.  The second suffers from being a bit too predictable and a climax that doesn't quite make proper sense, but I'd say it's well worth giving both a go.