Quarantine Control #156: Dragons, Mavericks, Titans, and Rabbits

DC Staff | March 30, 2023 | Animation, Movies, Television, Videogames | No Comments

In the newest sign that COVID-19 is apparently “over,” the United States Senate passed a measure to end the nationwide COVID-19 emergency declaration immediately. And before you might think it barely passed, know that it did so in a very bipartisan 68-23 manner. It’s likely to swim through the US House with the number of Republicans who believe COVID never happened, and the Biden White House is promising to sign it despite President Joe Biden saying he wouldn’t in January. Once again: You’ll have to look after yourself regarding the dangerous virus that’s still around now from here on, despite how unfeasible that is.

Drew Young

Dragon Quest VII: Fragments of the Forgotten Past — (2016)
Source: Nintendo 3DS
Episodes: 1, but it lasts a bit

This is not so much a review as it is a description of my experience. As you might recall, I mentioned Dragon Quest VII earlier this year as part of my heap of shamefully half-finished RPGs.

It’s also the cause of no small amount of concern on Magnus’ part, who has been impatiently waiting 15 years for me to play Dragon Quest IV. I vowed to play all the games in order, having already done so for Dragon Quest through Dragon Quest III. I would then become a liar and skip ahead to beat Dragon Quest IX out of sequence when it came out… and then comically keep playing it for 600 hours instead of using that time to knock out the DS releases of Dragons Quest IV, V, VI with plenty of time to tack on my copy of VIII for the Playstation 2. The things that should have been.

Then, the Dragon Quest VII remake landed on the 3DS and I made myself a liar again. It started the same way most new games find their way into my collection: I rent it from Gamefly, play it for a few hours to get a feel for it, and buy it if I like it enough to keep playing. Most of the time, it waits on my shelf for me to eventually come back to it. Dragon Quest VII was not one such time; I kept on playing for a good 50 hours until (by my estimation) somewhat shy of halfway through the game.

And there it stood, stuck at a boss fight I needed to grind levels in other vocations to best. I wasn’t very interested in pursuing that grind at the time, and never really got around to it. Dragon Quest VII sat there for years as I jumped from other game to other game, never coming back to continue the work until this month.

Before I swore off the last-minute eShop FOMO rush as utter nonsense, I spent much time looking up all the content that would soon become inaccessible for my 3DS games. It was then I learned of a feature in Dragon Quest VII hitherto unknown to me: it uses Streetpass to share random dungeons with other players, and a series of pregenerated dungeons with special monsters, bosses and rewards are available as free DLC.

(…I ALSO learned that SquareEnix also issued some extra story related quests for only the first year after the game’s release. Because they’re bastards. Had I known about it at the time, I could have downloaded them in the back stretch of my first 50 hours.)

I had a look, and 56 such dungeons were available, but only 14 could be downloaded at any given time for… reasons. Probably more bastardry. The difficulty of these dungeons varied wildly, so I decided my plan of action would be thus: I would immediately give up on taming the unique monsters in these dungeons; my sole goal would be collecting rewards. Thus, I’d just not download the dungeons with crummy rewards. Of those that remained, I only needed to beat all but the 14 toughest dungeons, which could just sit in my inventory until my party members were bad enough dudes to take them on.

Some of the dungeons were easy enough and obviously intended for you to explore shortly after unlocking the feature. Others made use of the rewards I already collected to better equip my party for the challenge. Still others taught me how to play the game again, as the toughest bosses required ardent overuse of whatever status effect they were vulnerable to.

It took a lot of trial and error, and added more than 10 hours to my playtime in all. But the reward for getting to the other side was more than mere treasure and beating the eShop clock. All the enemies that stood in my way in the DLC dungeons gave me plenty of fodder for leveling up new vocations — not to mention the characters themselves — in addition to refining my tactics and and slightly improving my gear (all the best stuff from the rewards is equipable until my minions get to level 35).

When all was said and done, I returned to the Cumulus Vex and, despite this boss having no status vulnerabilities, savagely crushed it in a beatdown so glorious that the Kingons have already written three operas about it.

While I won’t be continuing on my merry way just yet (I have plenty of Persona to get through first), the way is now clear when I do return.

Geoffrey Barnes

Top Gun: Maverick (2022)
Source: Amazon Prime Video
Episodes: 1 movie (the sequel to the 1986 film)

I was well aware of the positive critical and commercial reception Top Gun: Maverick garnered upon release, and the accolades it’s received since thanks to being a Best Picture Oscar nominee. But part of me still wasn’t convinced that it could be that great. This happened largely because I only watched the first film from 1986 last year during Maverick’s theatrical hype cycle, a fine-enough movie that felt like it should have been watched at the time it originally released to fully appreciate. The weaker character development wasn’t enough to carry the solid soundtrack and 1980s-soaked atmosphere in lieu of Navy pilots having an actual enemy to fight. With Maverick following the same format, it was tough to imagine this would be that much of a leap.

This was the point where I fully understood why Maverick generated so much praise, and why I agreed with the accolades after finishing it. The movie is an astounding leap over its predecessor in terms of, well, everything, and the fact that my expectations were so low thanks to that first film is partly why I came away so impressed — but only “partly.”

Maverick’s initial setup is fitting for a sequel. It takes place 30 years after the original film, yet the career of semi-titular pilot Captain Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise) has barely advanced thanks to the sheer recklessness he partially displayed in the first film, which again manifests at the beginning of this one after he destroys a new prototype. He’s saved by the actions of Admiral Tom “Iceman” Kazansky (Val Kilmer), who assigns him to teach a group of new students as part of a new Navy mission to destroy a unsanctioned uranium enrichment plant. It’s an ostensibly simple plotline, but the character development and writing powers it through, especially with one of the students, Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw (Miles Teller), being the son of Maverick’s late former teammate, Nick “Goose” Bradshaw (Anthony Edwards). It’s an easy way to generate drama, but that’s fine when it works so well.

On that note: Maverick itself is a masterclass in structuring a film. In addition to the writing and characters I mentioned above, the elements of which are on another level compared to the first film, this has some of the best pacing I’ve seen in a movie. It runs for about 130 minutes, close to average for an action movie these days, but it’s a testament to how intricately woven it is that it sure didn’t feel like it. I also appreciated that the movie has a more concrete villain for the pilots to fight and demonstrate the skills they’ve learned, unlike the previous movie’s encounter that felt tacked on at the end (even though it wasn’t production-wise).

The movie is called Top Gun, so the dogfights are a big attraction here. I’m sure they were downright invigorating to watch in theaters, a place I haven’t found myself within since the pandemic started. But they’re still absorbing to watch on the home screen thanks to the astounding direction. The ability for film cameras to track multiple fighter jets has evolved tremendously since the original Top Gun released in the mid 1980s, and I’m not being hyperbolic when I say that I have never seen a film assemble airborne action this well. The seconds are filmed in a wider IMAX-ready 1.90:1 aspect ratio compared to the 2.35:1 dialogue and, well, shirtless volleyball sequences, and it works splendidly.

The many additions to the cast are very good and more developed compared to the original movie’s counterparts, but I missed seeing more original cast members besides Maverick and Iceman. Poor Carole Bradshaw was left out despite Meg Ryan still being very active, and Charlotte “Charlie” Blackwood deserved a bit more than a passing mention despite Kelly McGillis being largely out of Hollywood these days. Maverick’s new love interest, Penelope “Penny” Benjamin, is great, though, played by the similarly-great Jennifer Connelly.

Maverick is the way to deliver a sequel. Sure, the movie plot beats are remarkably similar to the original, including the younger characters training before going on a real mission. The movie is so enjoyable regardless that I didn’t have a problem with that. It also doesn’t lean too hard on the nostalgia (Danger Zone only plays once, incredibly enough). The ending is well done enough that I sincerely hope Paramount doesn’t try to force another sequel. Tom Cruise sequels are what the Mission Impossible series is for, after all.

Angela Moseley

Attack on Titan, Final Season, The Final Chapters, Special 1 (2023)
Source: Crunchyroll, Hulu
Episodes: 1 specialized

First, I’d like to acknowledge how ridiculously long the title of this Attack on Titan special is. We’re getting into Raidou Kuzunoha absurdity levels here. Also, we’ve been in the “final season” of Attack on Titan for several years now. In a normal world with normal seasons, we’d be on season 6, but this massive phenomenon doesn’t breathe normal air. I’d also like to gloat a little. My 2023 predictions had some part of AoT’s finale being a movie, though I thought that would be after getting an actual season of the show. Instead, MAPPA has skipped the episodes and gone straight to a series of one hour specials.

We saw one part air at the beginning of March, and the second part will air sometime later this year. This “finale season” has been painfully drawn out despite the Attack on Titan manga ending in 2021. The first special saw some problems on Crunchyroll. It was so bad at one point that some fans feared that CR had lost the license– which would have likely been announced ahead of time. The special has been out for weeks now, and I finally got around to it last Friday. For those of you avoiding Crunchyroll, Hulu is a good option.

The first part of the special picks up exactly where season 4 left off. Eren has activated all the colossal Titans concealed in the walls of Paradis Island, starting the dreaded “Rumbling.” As Eren sets off what might as well be the combined force of thousands of nuclear bombs, he thinks to the people he met in Marley. One memory in particular haunts him. Ramzi, the small boy he rescued from being beaten up by Marleyans. As Ramzi thanks him, he breaks down in tears knowing that in a short time he’ll unleash devastating destruction upon humanity and this boy would die.

Which is exactly what happens when the point of view switches to the hapless people affected by the Rumbling. There is nowhere to run or hide as masses of giant titans crush everything in their path. The poor kid Eren spared? We’re treated to a gruesome shot of Ramzi being stepped on, even as falling rubble from destroyed buildings has crushed his brother. Getting away from the titans isn’t feasible as those who avoid being trampled are burned alive thanks to the tremendous heat these large monsters generate.

The former members of the Scout Regiment from Paradis aren’t going to simply let Eren destroy the world and make preparations to confront him. Members of the Scouts, Marleyan defectors, and Amumabito mechanics furiously work to get the “flying boat” air ready in Odiha before the Rumbling arrives. They manage to do so in a harrowing escape and as they ponder their plans on the airplane, Eren makes psychic contact with them. He’s not willing to peacefully call of the genocide and if they want to stop the Rumbling, they’ll have to kill him.

I would have preferred a proper season to kick off the anime adaptation of the last parts of Attack on Titan. Nevertheless, this special was very enjoyable. It fully shows the horror of unleashing thousands of humongous titans on the world. People are helpless against the wall of destruction and absolutely nothing they do matters. The irony is profound. The beginning of AoT is Eren lamenting that everyone on Paradis are the last of humanity because the titans killed everyone. He simply longs to see the world outside the protective walls. Now, years later he learns humanity is very much alive, and he’s using the power of titans to kill everyone not on Paradis. If you told me a decade ago this is how AoT would turn out, I would have been incredulous. I guess in a way I still am, even though the twist was masterfully built upon.

I also love how Attack on Titan forces both the characters and the audience to reckon with how best to dismantle an unjust, racist system. Should people work together and try to build bridges– even if one side is hostile? Or should the entire thing be blown upon and left to the survivors to figure out? Add to that, the perpetrators of said violence only learn they were in the wrong when the destruction comes to devour them. These are questions I should probably further explore once the show is actually finished. That said, global genocide is an awful solution even as it strives to fix an awful problem. I’m glad Attack on Titan is depicting just how ugly it all is.

It’s going to be a long wait for the next special.

Joseph Daniels

I’ve got three more movies I want to talk about this week for the Year of the Rabbit, so here we go. While all three are currently available on Netflix in Canada, you might need to find your own arrangements to watch some of them if you live in the United States.

Arctic Dogs (2019)
Available in the US on: Amazon Prime
Rabbits: Surprisingly, plenty of background characters

Arctic Dogs is about an arctic fox named Swifty who wants to be a courier, but who is stuck working in the mailroom instead. One day, he oversteps his bounds and delivers a package for his childhood sweetheart, and is punished for it. That’s a very basic premise, and it sort of makes it sound like Zootopia in a way. The plight of Swifty, who has to make up for the limits of his species so that he can hopefully one day live his dream, is remarkably similar to the plight of Judy Hopps, whose sense of justice made her want to join Zootopia’s police force, but who had to overcome the limits of her species. She was also put on parking duty when what she actually wanted to be was a police detective.

What sells Arctic Dogs for me is the movie’s sense of cuteness, along with a well cast set of actors, including John Cleese as the film’s antagonist and the MCU’s Jeremy Renner playing Swifty.

John Cleese plays a walrus who is mad at the world for refusing to acknowledge a self-proclaimed genius intellect (and from his interactions with actual genius Jade, Swifty’s childhood friend, I’m convinced that Otto Von Walrus is suffering from an acute case of Dunning Kruger), so he decides to melt the polar ice caps and flood out the nearby town of Taigasville. As a consequence, the world would be negatively affected, but he only has eyes for his own petty revenge.

Oddly enough, the cutest character for me is the conspiracy theory otter Bertha, who always looked so happy to be included in the film. She moves as gracefully as an otter and is fun to watch whenever she’s on the screen. I wish she was in more scenes.

Sadly, Arctic Dogs got savaged by critics and didn’t perform well at the box office, but if it were up to me, I’d give the film four out of five stars. It’s not trying to be the kind of high concept art that wins awards, it’s an hour and a half of fun entertainment with nothing cringeworthy, and the way the movie ends also reminds me of Zootopia in a way, with everyone able to contribute in their own unique way. Magda the caribou is the perfect arctic equivalent of Bogo. In fact, in a way, Arctic Dogs is better than Zootopia because the villain isn’t an eleventh hour fake out.

The Secret Life of Pets (2016)
Also available on: Crave (Canada)
Rabbits?: Snowball

If there’s two things I remember about Illumination, it’s that they’re the studio that created the Minions and in 2016, they released two movies that weren’t part of the Despicable Me franchise, both of which seemed like trailers that had a movie tacked on. The trailer for Sing deliberately imitated an audition episode of a TV show like American Idol, and the final film was actually pretty decent, and spawned a sequel which had no right to be as phenomenal as it was. The Sing movies basically struck gold.

The Secret Life of Pets, however, is the lesser of the two movies. The trailer centers around the gimmick that pets have their own private lives that begin once their owners leave the house, like the prim and proper poodle who calmly listens to classical music until their owner is out of earshot, which is when we find out he’s actually an extreme metalhead. The trailer is a classic, but the movie that’s grafted onto it isn’t as good.

It turns out that the movie is actually about a dog named Max who finds himself suddenly sharing a home with Duke, a rescue dog from the shelter, one who Max sees as an interloper. The two start out very antagonistic towards each other, which gets them both caught by dogcatchers intending to send them to the pound, but Duke reveals that if he ends up back at the pound, they’re going to kill him. The two are rescued by Snowball, the leader of a rebel army of unwanted pets, who is actually trying to bust out one of their own captured members and who allows Max and Duke to tag along. The rest of the movie involves Max and Duke learning to first tolerate one another and then come to appreciate each other as friends.

Meanwhile, Max’s neighbour Gidget has noticed he’s missing and spends much of the film trying to find him. It sort of feels like the entire movie is a set of disjointed vignettes that have been cobbled together into a loose narrative of dogs (and other various pets) lost in New York City and trying to find each other. And yet somewhere in the disjointed mess, there are occasional flashes of brilliance that almost redeems the movie. Almost.

When I talked about Pets United in an earlier column, I guessed that it was created to piggyback on this movie’s success and now that I’ve seen this movie, I can believe it.

I don’t know why I didn’t like The Secret Life of Pets. Its quality is about on par with the first Sing movie, and if the same pattern holds, the sequel should be amazing. However, the sequel is also not currently available outside of purchase or rental, and I’m not actually 100% confident that the second movie is going to surpass the first. If it comes to Netflix sometime in the future, especially before the end of the Year of the Rabbit, I’ll talk about it in a future Quarantine Control column. I do have one other film I want to talk about from Illumination, but I’ll save that for next week.

Animal Crackers (2017, 2020)
Rabbits?: One character, partially
Tigers?: Owen occasionally, other characters partially

I still have tigers left to talk about, but I think I’m going to slow down a bit from here on, only bringing them up once in a while, especially since it’s been a couple months since the Year of the Tiger ended. Also, the tigers are here as transformations only, due to the titular enchanted crackers. What happens is, Owen inherits a circus and a box of enchanted crackers that once made the circus great. Owen works as a doggy biscuit tester, but it’s unsatisfying work and after resisting the call for over half of the movie, he finally gives in and quits his job and goes to work full time at the circus as all of their animals.

In his way is the villainous Horatio P. Huntington, who believes he should’ve been the rightful owner of the circus and who runs a competing circus that is very much not successful at all. It began when he wanted the lovely Talia for himself, but she was in love with his brother, Buffalo Bob. After Horatio tried to deliver an ultimatum that was designed to break up the happy couple, his brother split off to form his own circus and became very successful, leaving Horatio in the dust. Years of bitter resentment come to a head in the present day as Horatio tries to learn the secret of Buffalo Bob’s circus, along with the help of the ridiculous Mario Zucchini. Earlier, I praised Arctic Dogs for assembling a great cast, but I think Zucchini is a bit too over the top, largely due to the on brand performance from legendary over the top actor Gilbert Gottfried. Unfortunately, his voice was always so incredibly distinctive and I could never tell if he always sounded like that or if he was instead directed to use the iconic voice instead of literally anything else, especially after his success as Iago in Aladdin.

In fact, there are aspects of this film that I feel could’ve been cut. There are portions that go on for a bit too long, and it feels like most of the dog biscuit factory arc is superfluous, but I guess they justify its inclusion by the end of the film. Still, I feel similarly about this movie as I did when I was watching The Secret Life of Pets. I meandered through a movie that should’ve been more enjoyable.

I guess it doesn’t help that minor nuisance Brock basically gets away with most of his awful behaviour. Do you recall the Donald Trump caricature that John Oliver always brings up on Last Week Tonight? Where Trump will do something ridiculous and awful on purpose and look smug while doing it? Brock is basically the Trump caricature, and when he’s faced with consequences, he refuses to listen and instead runs away in fear like those recent AI generated images of Trump being arrested for his crimes. In the end, Brock gets turned into a mandrill, but I don’t know if he’ll get the opportunity to turn back. It would honestly serve him right if he gets put in a zoo, but sadly, the characters don’t even try to find some proof that he’s constantly trying to sabotage Owen and his co-worker Binkley at the doggy biscuit factory, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they turn him back, too. He’ll basically get off scot-free, pretty much like both attempts to impeach Trump.

I do wonder how the indictment is going to go, though. Dude can’t be made of teflon forever.

Anyway, Animal Crackers didn’t really work for me either. If not for Arctic Dogs, this week would’ve been the week of the also rans. Not everything rabbit related is good, just like not everything tiger related is good. Next week, I’ll talk about a few more rabbit films that are… well, about the same level of quality, unfortunately.

This Week’s Short Film
Lackadaisy Pilot Episode (2023)

Next week’s Quarantine Control entry will be the closest we’ll get to the third anniversary of its start, but, uh, don’t expect everyone to have something special for the occasion. Instead, the biggest celebration will be the mere acknowledgement of how long this ongoing feature has lasted. Anticipate it, at least slightly.

Feel Free to Share