Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem (finale)
Twenty or so minutes left to go. Let's see if I can finish the movie in one more post! Interstella 5555, the two final tracks on the album.
And yeah, the last song is by far the longest; significantly moreso than "Veridis Quo."
Track 13: "Face to Face"
Energetic drumbeats with a very "up and at 'em" sort of pace break the silence, and we fade in on a human work crew recovering the Hedgeheg from its jungle crash site.
This could be either very good or very bad for our heroes, depending.
As the electronica and vocals start joining the mix, we see a montage of Oc-Tavoth being taken away in a heavily guarded ambulance while police, reporters, and uniformed officials crowd around the building. The other three Crescendolls, still human in appearance, are at the center of the throng. Again, could be very good or very bad depending. The fact that the press have gotten at least some of this on video probably helps their chances somewhat, though.
The TV newscast shows Oc-Tavoth's teal skin, and then begins an expository on "Operation: Goodbye Crescendolls." And no, they're not going to be publically executed for the crime of being xenos. From the look of things, the newscast has a physicist guest speaker to explain their plans to try and send them back to their homeworld.
That is...surprising, to say the least. I'm not just saying this because of my own (fairly cynical) predictions of what real life human governments would do if you put them in this situation. I'm saying it because up until now, Robotwig has basically been our species' representative in the story. No other humans besides he and his minions have really been given agency, so his group have kind of been our only example for comparison and contrast with the tealosians. Human behavior at the peripheries of the story has also been framed as heedless and incurious at best, greedy and callous at worst (the focus on homeless people being a thing that exists in the middle of a prosperous, glamorous human city doesn't seem like its meant to reflect well on us as a whole). So, it really comes as a surprise that the movie is now looking directly at the audience and saying "but actually, humans aren't bastards."
I guess that might be the whole point, though. Cooperation comes more naturally than competition. Maybe the message is supposed to be that things wouldn't be so bad if human nature were only allowed to express itself without the stresses of (real, or invented by charismatic, corrupted individuals like Robotwig) scarcity. Or maybe we're just doing more of a "matter of perspective" thing, with the world being colder and crueller when seen through the lens of the Earl's control, but softer when seen through the Crescendolls' own more optimistic eyes.
Maybe. I don't know. In any case, it's a real gear shift, and it feels self-aware about how jarring of a change in attitudes it represents, so it's got to be trying to say something.
The three uninjured Crescendolls are shown being backed into a metallic...place?...where uniformed men are trying to calm them down. Then we see men from a number of agencies investigating the ruins of Darkwood Castle. Surprisingly, the ritual cave is still largely intact, despite having appeared to be ground zero of the blast.
They collect a few occult tomes that weren't incinerated, as well as a bunch of machine parts and a bunch of silvery metal ingots that look a lot like the hull of the Shark. Looks like the rest of the world might be about to actually replicate and mass produce the villain's supertech instead of just forgetting about it after his defeat. A vanishingly rare occurrence in the genre.
Meanwhile, the Crescendolls have calmed down, and also restored to their original appearances. Lol, did they just taser the other three? I'll bet they just tasered them. Or maybe just had them stick their fingers in a wall socket or something. Anyway, they're being kept in a hospital for the recovery process, and Oc-Tavoth is waking up in a hospital bed to see the other three already restored. Damn, that taser really fucked him up. I guess there's a reason they classify those as "less lethal" and not "nonlethal."
For some reason the record company boss is in their hospital room with them, and seems to have sort of taken charge of their wellbeing now. And this is being framed as a good thing, as best I can tell, which...well, okay I guess?
When Oc-Tavoth is able to get out of his bed, the four of them step out onto a balcony to see that humanity as a whole does seem to be sympathetic to their plight.
There are even people wearing teal makeup as a show of solidarity. On one hand, cute. On the other, I'm not sure if the creators thought about the historical connotations that "painting your face the color of another ethnic group's skin" has. It doesn't ruin the moment or anything, but it gave me a split second's "...um?" reaction.
There's some more montage shots of technicians reverse-engineering the Darkwood techbase. The Crescendolls getting their memories restored from the original disc recordings. That physicist who was on TV explaining the practicalities of hyperspace travel to what looks like the UN. Then, finally, the Crescendolls putting on some souped-up NASA space suits and saying goodbye to Earth.
In particular, to the record company exec. Because of the close friendship they built with him offscreen I guess.
If the movie had shown this guy expressing a little bit of interest or concern for them when they were under Robotwig's thumb, it would have done a lot to set this up. Like, just had him look a little skeptical at the way Robotwig has always dragging them around by the ear, and had Robotwig need to put some visible effort into assuaging his concerns. That would also make him a bit more nuance and depth in THIS sequence, I think; if he was clearly feeling some degree of guilt for not acting on his misgivings sooner and investigating their situation, then him doing what he can to help them now would have more weight to it.
Also...the Earl wasn't just a metaphor for the music industry's exploitative nature, but he was definitely partly that. Having there then be this saintly record tycoon who becomes their main benefactor now changes it from a criticism of the industry as a system into "there are good bosses and bad bosses." I'm sure you can understand why I find that less incisive. If this guy had had misgivings, but been tempted into not acting on them when Robotwig pointed out how much money he was making him, then I feel like that would also preserve the social criticism while still keeping the optimistic tone of this ending. "Good people can be incentivized to do bad things because of the systems they exist in, but it's never too late to turn yourself around" would have done nicely.
Well, anyway. After the Crescendolls say goodbye, we see them climbing into Earth's first FTL-capable spacecraft, the Fleshlight, which promptly takes off.
I'm guessing they built this using parts recovered from the Hedgeheg and prototypes developed from the stuff they found in...oh. Oops. The Fleshlight is actually just a launch vehicle. It breaks up in orbit, and the restored Hedgeheg flies out.
I was hoping this would be Earth's first non-supervillain interstellar spacecraft getting its maiden voyage. Ah well.
...actually, what even happened to the Shark? Last time we saw it, it was disguised as an ad blimp. Unless Robotwig really did have it sprawled out and intertwined with his castle, it should still be intact wherever he left it. Wonder if it ever gets found?
As they slingshot around and away from Earth, S'telha briefly hallucinates that Sahn'hik is sitting in the pilot's seat in the cockpit with them. It's gone after a moment, though. She really fell for him fast, didn't she? Or I guess they really did have a psychic dream connection for years prior to this, that's also possible. IDK.
Anyway, one nice touch to this scene is that they're wearing space suits even though we know the ship isn't supposed to require that kind of protection while you're inside it.
It's a reminder that the ship's been repaired by people with a slightly inferior techbase, and hastily refitted with an FTL engine from a vastly superior techbase that nobody involved understands very well. There's a lot of shit that could go wrong, and they're under no illusions about that possibility.
I wish this sequence had more details like that. Like, the Crescendolls are all smiling throughout the launch and gravity slingshot scenes, as are the humans monitoring their progress from the surface. Everything looks all bright and sunny and squeaky clean throughout. Etc. The reason I wish there were more tension-building details is because the song has a lot of tension in it. "Face to Face" isn't melancholy or dispirited like "Veridis Quo," but it definitely has an anxious, anticipatory element to it that counteracts the otherwise high energy. Showing the characters looking more nervous and high-strung about what they're about to do would have better fit the vibe, as well as preserved more of a sense of drama now that the villain is out of the story.
As such, on top of the various minor plot details that rub me the wrong way, I feel like this is one of the weaker segments from an artistic standpoint as well. The visuals and the music just don't match as well as most of the previous tracks' did.
Track 14 "Too Long"
This final track is more than twice the length of any of the previous ones. The title kind of has to be a joke at its own expense.
The Hedgeheg moves toward the moon, where...huh. The way it's shot, I can't tell if they opened the hyperspace portal using a device added to their ship, or if there's just a permanent portal hidden behind the moon that Robotwig made use of. Could be either. Anyway, they fly the Hedgeheg in. A ribbon of angry, molten crimson energy pursues them, the portal closing behind it.
Well, I guess if the portal is just a permanent fixture then it at least needs some kind of outside activation.
Also, I'm amused at the thought of Robotwig's ghost just waiting in lunar orbit for months hoping that the Crescendolls will try to use the portal so he can follow them in and get revenge. Like, really dude? I get that your apotheosis plan went haywire and turned you into a shapeless smoke monster, so your original life plans might be infeasible, but still, you could be trying to do something with your unlife.
Inside the funky warp dimension, the Crescendolls begin their second intergalactic journey. Notably, they aren't having nearly as many problems with the glowy warp blobs as Sahn'hik did, so the Hedgeheg clearly has had some hyperspace-friendly upgrades regardless of whether or not it can actually open portals on its own. They're making pretty smooth progress until the fucked up ghost-thing bumps against the tail of their ship and then engulfs them.
It's not clear what he can do to them, physically. But he's shaking the Hedgeheg around if nothing else, and possibly slowing it down. And eventually he might be able to possess them or something too, who knows. Anyway, this is definitely a "fuck around and find out" sort of situation, so the Crescendolls struggle to find something other than fucking around that they can do. Unfortunately, their options are limited. The Hedgeheg may not even have functioning weapons at this point, assuming those ever would have helped against a ghost.
But, then another ball of warp lightning slams into the roiling mass. It's Sahn'hik's own ghost! Which is powerful enough to defeat Robotwig's mutant failed god thing, I guess.
He punches it off of the ship, and then wrestles it far away into warpspace, followed by an explosion of crimson-and-monochrome energy that suggests its destruction. Then the ship exits the warp at their destination point, and we see Sahn'hik's ghost flying away in realspace. Going...somewhere, I guess.
S'telha stares wistfully after him as he flies away into the stars.
I guess there's a reason he can't just stick around. Ghost rules or something. Well, anyway, they're back in realspace now, in the outskirts of their own not-so-5ecret star system.
…
You know, the way the drumbeats kicked in when the ghost attacked their ship kinda worked, even if the song's persistent up-beatness felt a little wrong for it. But then after the ghost fight ends and the ship keeps flying through hyperspace and then realspace, the song's intensity doesn't change again. It just stays ramped up, and doesn't really change in any other attention-getting way when the conflict is resolved and we go back to a chill spaceflight.
The first half of the movie seems to be better tailored to the music than the second half. There are definitely exceptions, but overall that's been the trend.
…
As they cruise through realspace, the Crescendolls make their way from the cockpit to the cabin. Which apparently they didn't look at until now, because S'telha is only now discovering that the place is a shrine to her.
How romantic.
She remembers one of the flower garden dream sequences as she looks. Maybe suggesting that they really did have a psychic dream romance. Maybe just suggesting her realizing just how long he's been into her for, and her apparently liking it.
They lay down and rest in the cabin, napping a bit while they can. Once they wake up, they decide to just start playing. They have their instruments aboard, and they don't really have a better way to pass the time, so they sit down and play. Their playing to the music is timed with the addition of electric guitar, which is a better audiovisual sync than the movie has had for a few tracks now.
It's the first time they've played their music without being forced to since they were abducted. The low-key nature of their performance - sitting rather than standing, leaning inward to suggest that they aren't playing very loudly or enthusiastically - has a rehabilitative vibe to it. Like they're exercising their ability to do artistic expression, now that the last vestige of Robotwig has been banished.
This might be a bit of an insensitive analogy to make, but I can't think of a better one. This scene reminds me of stuff I've read about rape victims trying to retake their own sexuality after feeling like they've been alienated from it. It's not just that the Crescendolls are remembering how to play from the heart. They're also working away at the trauma that's become associated with them playing their music. Black and white clips of their most harrowing memories from Earth play over the scene as they rediscover their music, as they help each other through.
The music also works much better for this slow, unhurried recovery and healing than it did for the zany space magic action that preceded it. And the timing with the guitar addition is very refreshing after the so-so (at best) handling of music and visuals in the warp ghost fight scene.
After what seems to be the better part of a day or so, they come within realtime range of Tealios. The telemetry operators are a lot sharper now than they were the last time we saw them. I'm just surprised that it's the same telemetry operators, given how poorly they did their jobs last time.
There's some nice scenery as they return to Tealios and let us see more of the planet as they glide in for a landing. Twisting fungiform forests growing out of shallow lakes full of tealiosian swimmers who stop to wave and cheer at the returning vessel. Flowers like satellite dishes that rise among craggy mountains, mountain-sized themselves. Multilegged structures of volcanic glass that stand high enough for the ship to fly under them.
Aesthetically speaking, I still think Tealios is the highest point of this movie (and it has plenty of other high points). I really want to look into what else this studio has done; I remember wanting to look into this the last time I saw this movie, but I didn't get around to it.
Anyway, the next thing we see is the Crescendolls being airdropped into the same concert hall they were abducted from. I want to say that some artistic license was taken here, and that they didn't drop down and start playing for a ready-assembled crowd the literal instant they got back to their homeworld heh. Anyway, it does suit the festive final minutes of "Too Long" quite well, so that's good.
They play. People cheer and dance, both in the hall and elsewhere across the planet as they tune in. And...also back on Earth, apparently.
It looks like they've set up an FTL commlink between Earth and Tealios. Well, that should make things interesting going forward!
Also, S'telha twerks right into the camera.
The cinematography has paid a lot of attention to S'telha's ass over the course of the movie, and sure, the animators have every reason to be proud of the work they did there and want to show it off. On the other, they're really going all in on it now in a way they weren't before, and the placement feels kinda weird.
The Crescendolls are later seen leading the unveiling ceremony for the big memorial statue the Tealosians build for Sahn'hik. The founding sacrifice for this new era of intergalactic community.
There are some old tealosians in bright blue robes at the front of the crowd who look like they might be priests or something. I dig.
Then we see a little boy's bedroom. He's been listening to Daft Punk and playing with his eclectic toy collection.
O...kay. I feel like they could have either done this, OR had Daft Punk appear as a bit role in the "High Life" scene. Both of them together feels like it's sort of a double-negative.
Anyway, this all having been a game that this kid was playing with his toys while being inspired by the music does explain a few aesthetic incongruities at the very least. Like, the Robotwig de Darkwood toy is jammed in a box with his space marine minions from the abduction scene, but they're very clearly toys from two completely different sets that this kid decided belonged together. Likewise, the human and tealiosian toy versions of the Crescendolls don't really look that much alike; as if he just picked four human toys and four alien toys of the same sexes and decided one set gets turned into the other. Etc.
The kid seems to have fallen asleep while playing, so his mother comes in to put him to bed and kiss him goodnight.
Awwww, she even put the little S'telha and Sahn'hik action figures together beside him. She's been paying attention to his games! Or to whatever movie or whatever they came from, if they're a canon ship in their original context.~
That's a decent follow up to the movie's opening quote. "Musicians are magicians, that's what I always say. I've always had this dream or hope since my childhood, and the dream itself came toward me. How should I explain this...I have all these lights in my head." The ability of music to bring out imagination, whether in children or in adults. A common experience to all walks of life.
That framing gives the plot of the story-within-a-story another dimension as well. We have a world of beauty, wonder, and glamour, and the more banal and often very unpleasant Earth. Humans reach out for that other world, to take what it has to offer and bring it home with us, guided by a sound or a scent that sometimes only they can hear. The question is just what you do with that bounty once you've found it. And the answers depend on how greedy, jaded, and cynical you happen to be. You can read the villain's plan literally as exploitation and commodification of artists, but maybe it's really about the exploitation and commodification of art itself. Imagination only being valued as something you can monetarily profit from. Children, of course, being the least tainted by those more cynical pressures.
That said, I think my biggest problem with this movie is that for all its glorification of originality and unconstrained creativity, it leans on some pretty dismal cliches.
I understand that a purely visual movie like this is going to have to rely on a lot of genre signifiers and narrative shorthands in order to tell a complicated story. But, there comes a point beyond which rather than helping tell the story, these cliches just weigh it down. For instance, let me get back to something I left hanging in an earlier post: why do we need to know that Robotwig's father got smashed by a meteor in front of him when he was six? Well, probably they're saying that he lost his innocence early on, and thus resents innocence in others (tying into the subtext of generational conflict that I talked about after the "Veridis Quo" segment). That his feeling of powerlessness and helplessness gave him a need for power and control, and that having one of his loved ones taken away by the powers of outer space gave him the idea that it's only just for him to do the same thing back at the heavens. Probably something along those lines, right? Or, to put it another way: because he was a victim, he was fated to become an abuser.
Yeeeeeah.
I'm not against giving a villain a tragic backstory, but...well, you know what, I've already snarked about the "five hundred year old alchemists with daddy issues" commonality, so let's do this. In Fullmetal Alchemist, the homunculus became a villain because he grew up in an environment where the only way to make things better for himself was by helping humans destroy each other so he could loot the wreckage. He had it drilled into him, over and over, that power over others is the only thing that matters, and the only way people would ever care about him is if he forced them to (and then went completely unhinged when even that didn't work). The story showed us how and why his horrible upbringing shaped him into what he became. In Interstella 5555, the attitude is basically just "something bad happened to him as a kid, so he became a bad person when he grew up."
Those of you who are old enough to remember the time period that this movie came out in probably recall the downright ubiquitous stigma attached to child abuse victims in that era. It's gotten much better since then, but it isn't gone by any means. I also earnestly feel that this sort of victim-blaming paradigm - stay away from the unfortunate, or they'll take their misfortune out on you - is closely related to, eg, attitudes about homeless people, which is pretty ironic considering the homeless motif during the middle part of the movie.
The Earl really didn't need a tragic backstory at all to make his character work. Tacking an irrelevant sob story onto the puppy-kicking villain and then not doing anything with that was a popular cliche in the nineties and early aughts, and the way it played into victim-stigma was often a lot more uncomfortable than this movie's version of it. It's ubiquitous enough in media from that era that I'd normally just sigh and move on with just a snide comment or two. But in this case I feel like I HAVE to hold it against the work, because this is a perfect *example* of wild, innocent creativity being shackled by ugly narratives pushed by cynical social forces.
Another example of what I'm talking about is...well, yeah, you all knew I was going to get to this sooner or later...S'telha. Like, almost everything about S'telha's treatment by the story. I held off on this because the movie did start out with all four of the Crescendolls being equals in victimhood. But then, throughout the movie, every one of the male characters was given their moment to be heroic, and she just kept being made the damsel in distress over and over again. In fact, two out of the three male Crescendolls have rescuing S'telha from something as their big triumphant moment. Arpajjas punched out the villain in the cave scene. Oc-Tavoth drove the getaway van once, and did the (failed, but still, at least he got to try!) record company heist later on. Bhreel snuck into the awards ceremony and sonic screwdriver'd S'telha's glasses. The way that the story contrived to have her and her alone get *repeatedly* victimized again while everyone else stays free started to feel downright spiteful by the final "Veridis Quo" instance. The closest she ever came to being an agent in the story was when Sahn'hik pulled the mystery hologram out of their shared dream. Something that he gave to her. She helped the team by being an appealing sex object that passively motivates men to do things. And also picking up a piece of paper while in a half-asleep daze I guess.
Well, I guess she was also the one who put the flower on Sahn'hik's grave, which may or may not have been what allowed him to turn into a blazing space god. But that's kind of a stretch, and even if that is supposed to be what happened there's no indication that she knew she was doing anything besides decorating a grave.
The whole stalker fan thing with her and Sahn'hik is another trip in and of itself, of course. Once again, it's a fucked up thing that was unfortunately prevalent in the media at that time. Once again, the story of Interstella 5555 didn't even get anything out of its inclusion. It would have been absolutely no more difficult for the creators to establish him as a former fifth band member or S'telha's fiancée or something, but they chose to go this route instead. Some people have tried to read a romantic history between the two of them into the movie, but honestly I really don't see it. The closest thing that's ever implied to that is the indication that they might have had shared rosefield frollicking dreams in the past, but even that is highly ambiguous since we never see S'telha experience one of those until after she and Sahn'hik have met in person. As far as I can tell, the movie thinks that being an obsessive fan who lusts after their own imagined, idealized version of someone is legitimately romantic. "Work hard enough, and you will "get" the girl of your dreams, whether or not you even know a damned thing about her going into this" was, again, ubiquitous in the nineties and early aughts. You found it in movies, TV shows, books, music videos, you name it.
But one place where I *don't* think you would have found that shit would have been in the games a five year old kid played with his toys. Maybe if the kid at the end has looked a few years older than that, I could have bought him catching and copying this shite from his media environment. At that age, though? No. I don't think a kid that age would have yet learned the wrong lessons from his culture environment to include the "villain is a monster because his dad died" shit in his games. And, I'm pretty sure that girl action figures and boy action figures both get to kick a fair amount of ass (even if it's not perfectly even amounts) when a five year old is handling them.
I guess, in a strange way, these issues help prove the movie's own point. It knows that it wasn't made by pure-hearted children with uninhibited imaginations, but I'm not sure if it realizes just how much that shows.
I'll close this whole topic with a reminder that none of these issues are particularly egregious by the standards of the time. Like I said, I attribute their presence to the movie relying on common tropes and clichés to (in theory) expedite its storytelling. I'm only making a big deal out of this because of how it gives the film's message such a harshly bittersweet aftertaste. What we're seeing ISN'T what the kid was playing with his toys. It's the world-weary, media-saturated filmmaker in the opening trying to recreate his memories of what being a kid playing with toys is like, and not realizing where he's failed. Obviously, a movie actually written by a five year old would have a lot more and bigger issues, but I guarantee you that they wouldn't include these issues.
I'll also reiterate what I said in the intro: whatever else this movie may be, it's primary purpose is to be a compound music video for Daft Punk's "Discovery." On the aesthetic front, I think it mostly succeeds. There are definitely places where the story and the music seem like they're trying to force a round peg into a square hole, but those places are relatively few and far between, and the high points of audiovisual synthesis easily make up for them. The abduction sequence ("One More Time" and "Aerodynamic") on its own is an absolute masterwork of interpretive animation. The "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger," "High Life," and final third or so of the "Too Long" finale sequences lag only slightly behind it.
In terms of sheer aesthetic, it's a very pretty movie to watch. The characters (aside from the Peanutsoform ones, but that may just be personal taste) are all really fun to look at, and their designs ooze with personality. In particular, the non-Peanuts Crescendolls just radiate a wholesomeness and sensuality that perfectly sells their role. The movie's decision to only indulge Daft Punk's robotic aesthetic sparingly, featuring a mostly modern urban setting with only occasional pastel-colored scifi setpieces, works a lot better than you might expect going in, especially in the way it uses the futuristic aesthetic to code things as otherworldly and exceptional. And the scenery, god, the scenery. I gushed about the space vistas at the beginning, but the Crescendolls' drive through the French countryside was really almost as good.
And hell, I still want to see more of Tealios drawn and animated in this ethereal anime style. I'd pay for another movie that just used random places and goings-on as music vids for more Daft Punk songs. Or even someone else's songs.
The technicalities of animation aren't something I'm sufficiently educated enough to talk about at length, though. If they were, I probably would have spent much more of this review gushing about that, and the overall tone would have likely been more positive. Anyway, my point here is that if you're asking the question "does the Discovery album have a good music video?" then the answer is definitely yes. It's not perfect as a music vid, but it's pretty damned good, and there are some specific song segments that get as close to perfection as you can reasonably expect.
So, that's Interstella 5555. It's a gem, but it's a flawed gem. The fact that its flaws are accidentally self-reflective honestly makes the gem comparison much more fitting; you can see the cracks refracted and magnified in the light of its own facets.
