Pluto (2023)
Netflix original anime series based on a Manga by Naoki Urasawa which is in turn a gritty reimagining of a story arc of the iconic children's manga Astroboy.
There are two things I want to preface this with: I didn't particularly enjoy it, but I do think it's a hell of an interesting show. So interesting that I would like to get a bit deeper into it than I usually do, so here's another note: Watch out, spoilers.
First things first. I don't know a whole lot about Osamu Tezuka's Astroboy (or, to use the original title, Mighty Atom) franchise and as a matter of fact watching Pluto was the only reason I decided to look into it at all. I know that Atom is one of Japans most beloved manga characters and for the longest time I more or less just assumed he was sort of a squeaky clean cartoon character. But as I understand Astroboy did occasionally get surprisingly political. There was apparently a story where Atom travelled back in time to stop an American plane from bombing a Vietnamese village during the Vietnam War. Which, I genuinely mean it, is pretty cool.
So, Pluto is based on an Astroboy story arc called "The Greatest Robot on Earth". A story about an evil Middle Eastern dictator who commands a mad scientist to build a powerful robot to fight and destroy all the strongest robots on earth. Pluto takes this story and rewrites it into a globe trotting murder mystery that, mostly, follows android Gesicht, detective at Interpol, as he investigates a series of murders of robots and robot rights activists around the world, unraveling political intrigue, plots by sinister hate groups, covered up war crimes and shady science experiments.
Credit where its due, Pluto juggles a lot of plot threads and characters without carelessly dropping any of them, at the end it all ties them together pretty tightly and never gives off the impression of presenting mysteries for mysteries sake without knowing how to resolve them. It doesn't do that Abrams/Lindelof thing of either hand waving them away or quietly dropping them, hoping the viewer will just forget about it. And that whole "globe trotting mystery" angle sure serves well to keep the momentum going, it does constantly introduce interesting new scenery and setpieces that make it feel both vast in scale but also densely written.
So, all of this sounds great, right? Why did I not enjoy it more, then? Well, a couple of reasons. For one, I just found a lot of the emotional beats too heavy handed to take seriously and too many of the plot beats too contrived. There's an episode in the latter half where Gesicht learns two key pieces of information righter after one another in ways that are so comically convenient it damn near made me role my eyes. And there's a whole bunch of clunky little moments like that that I feel like individually, I could have probably pretty easily looked past, but taken together, they kinda added up enough to be irritating. But honestly, even that's not really it. I can still look past my misgivings with the nitty gritty of it if I like the bigger picture and this is where we get to the actual substance of my criticism.
So, bear with me here. This is where we get into the specifics. Last warning. I'm gonna spoil the series. It was the final episode after Gesicht had died and the focus shifted to Atom/Astroboy stopping the big bad robots from detonating a bomb to cause the eruption of a volcanoe that would wipe out most of humanity. And I kinda sighed and said to the person I was watching it with "Why does there always need to be a doomsday device?".
And then I did a double take. "Why _does_ there always need to be a doomsday device?"
And that's when some gears in my head started turning and I started to see the bigger picture and why exactly it didn't quite come together for me. All of Pluto's lofty ambitions and all its earnest attempts at political and social commentary and its bold decision to use a thinly veiled allegory for the Iraq War as its centerpiece there was really only one way it could have ended without betraying its source material. And, at the risk of stating the obvious, I feel like there's sort of a greater insight to be derived from it.
Pluto is an adaptation of an Astroboy comic. All the added nuance and complexity and allegory aside, the only way it could have possibly ended was always "Astroboy saves humanity by punching the bad guy and foiling his evil plan.". And, you know, that's clearly not a cop out, it's a very deliberate decision. And this has gotten me thinking because, you know, that's kind of the template for a lot of contemporary genre fiction that seeks to elevate what is widely considered low brow or juvenile material. Looking at some of the more ambitious recent superhero movies here, taking something like Batman, it's hard to argue that creators like Reeves, Snyder and Nolan have created some very complex and very mature takes on the material but there is, there practically has to be, the point where all that complexity is resolved, the stage is set, the alignments are clear and it all sort of crystalizes into the point when Batman has to punch the bad guy and foil his scheme.
And I'm aware, I probably sound like I'm doing a bit here, and I kinda am, but hear me out. It's the distilled essence of the structure of the modern superhero movie, if not action movie in general, that seeks to elevate its source material while keeping its structure intact. Looking at the more ambitious entries in the genre, the most recent Avengers Duology, Logan, Captain America Civil War... hell, I love the movie to bits, but Batman v Superman is almost the perfect text book example. An incredibly dense movie full of political and social commentary, character exploration, allusions to mythology but, in the end, there is a bad guy who has an evil plan that would destroy the world and Batman and Superman have to punch the bad guy and foil his plan. Hell, not to put to fine a point on it, but the monster Lex Luthor summons is literally named Doomsday!
On a side note, you know Watchmen? The definitive deconstructive superhero comic? Well, that's exactly why it is the definitive deconstructive superhero comic, isn't it? Because they don't punch the bad guy. And they don't foil his plan. The bad guys plan succeeds just fine. And whatever you can say about Watchmen, this still stands as a genuinely ballsy move.
And let me circle back around to Pluto here. That is why there needs to be a doomsday device. Because, despite adding all those complex, byzantine decorations that give it the appearance of a socially conscious sci-fi political thriller it's in essence a superhero adventure story and to finally make my point, after all that it has set up, the payoff just didn't do it for me. Again, I know it's not a matter of poor judgement on the authors part, people who read or watched it as an Astroboy adaptation would surely have been dissapointed if the climax played out any other way. But it wasn't my cup of tea. Interestingly enough, the most jarring thing it added to the original story was a sort of bigger picture man-behind-the-man villain who had little set up, little screen time, no backstory, a very unceremonial demise and seemed to only exist as a somewhat gratuitous cheap shot at the United States. I don't have anything clever to add about it, but that was weird, right?
I know this was a lot ramblier than my write ups of stuff I watched usually are but hey, this one got me thinking which, I guess, is to its credit. I didn't like it very much but unlike something like, say, Psycho Pass, which I watched a while ago, I found at least aspects of it interesting enough to talk about at greater length. Overall though, I stand by what I said, it wasn't my cup of tea.
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