Shawn Watson From the cover art I assumed that this would be a 90-minute affair about some kind of village annual games and that's what got me interested. It's not like that at all. It's a 2-hour techno-thriller, and a badly misconceived one at that. I can't remember any of the characters names, so it'll be hard for me to give you a rundown of the plot, but in this version of 2010 the whole world is plugged into a overlarge social networking site and a sinister entity within is using it to...I dunno...something...and knock a satellite out of the air to land on a nuclear power plant and blow up...some place. Only an extended family of eccentrics can band together and stop it because they all just-so-happen to be involved in the tech business and have everything that they need at their disposal.This is nonsense. There is a really good core concept here, but this is not the right way to tell it. Some ideas in Summer Wars are clever and they are wasted. It's too quirky, overlong, and seems like a mash-up of two unrelated scripts that got mixed together when two interns collided in a hallway and didn't bother to keep their papers separate. I won't be watching this again.

phoenix 2 My main problem with this movie-anime was the whole Oz thing. I was kind of confused on what it was and how it worked. For what I gathered, it was an international internet base that controlled every aspect of the everyday life. So, everyone was depending on it without realising it, until a virus takes over and then everything gets out of control. I liked the concept of tradition and family bonds managing to effect even the technological, cyber world. And, due to the Oz thing, there was a lot of action in this movie. However, it still felt a little odd, as the cyber battles were presented like real ones. Other than that, the concept was nice and the characters interesting, though they never were explored in depth. Another thing that bothered me was that the final battle took too long. After the hero won, the virus always found a way to take control again, and it seemed like they would never win over. So, 4 out of 10.

Jacob Thompson I was expecting to absolutely love this movie. I was expecting to fall in love with it like I did with Mamoru Hosoda's other films like Wolf Children and the Girl Who Leapt Through Time. And while this film was in no means bad, I couldn't help but feel a little underwhelmed by it.What's good about it: The animation is great and unique as always, A lot of the emotional scenes were handled pretty maturely, and it can be pretty engaging and gripping at times.What's bad about it: They're trying to tell two different stories at once. One story being about a bunch of people trying to save the world from a corrupt artificial intelligence and the other being about a kid who has to pretend to be the fiancé of a girl he likes. And they're not balanced out very well. I personally think it would've worked if both of these stories were two separate films. Another issue with the film is that the characters that are meant to be important (the love interest in particular) had little to no development outside of just being the love interest. The reason behind that is because there were too many characters. A lot of the film focused more on her family than it did the actual main characters. If you want this character to have a big family, then fine, more power to ya. But you shouldn't put all of your focus on them. You should keep the focus where it should be: on the main characters.But even with these issues, does this film still hold up? Yeah. This movie is in no mean amazing or even great, I still think it's decent. However, if you were expecting a masterpiece like Wolf Children or the Girl Who Leapt Through Time, you may wanna look elsewhere. For me, I'm glad I saw it, I just wouldn't see it again.

zetes A teenage boy lives two lives, as everyone does in the world of this film: the real and the virtual. In the real, he goes on vacation to his would-be girlfriend's family reunion, where he is forced to pretend to be the girl's actual boyfriend. While navigating the tricky situation there, in the virtual world he's tricked into releasing a malicious A.I. that starts to consume the accounts of a good chunk of the world population. The virtual world, called OZ, has a lot of influence on how the real world runs, and the A.I. begins destroying the real world from the inside out. This film isn't bad, but it's a little too vague to work. The characters are all paper-thin and the rules of its universe are ill-defined. It's also ugly to look at. The animation is too choppy and cheap-looking. The virtual world is a little more interesting than the real world, but it's nothing too special to look at, either. Worth checking out, but it's far below the director's earlier work, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.