Interstella 5555: the 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem (part two)
Continuing with a guitar shaped spaceship, the USS Hedgeheg, receiving an urgent signal from the the planet Tealios. As we zoom in on the ship, the frantic sounds of "Aerodynamic" die in another churchbell-like outro, and a gentler song takes their place.
Track 3: "Digital Love"
This whole time I thought it was spelled "Digitalove," like a compound word. My bad.
Anyway, this song actually has a little bit of personal resonance for me, due to a family member frequently playing it right after this album came out in 2001 when I was going through a rough and, frankly, surreal period of my life. Pretty much everything I heard and saw in the 2001-2 era got burned into my memory in a weird way, like the memories of one of those extremely vivid dreams that don't fade like most, and this song is one of those things.
I don't think I can attribute that to the song itself. It's a great song on its own merits, probably one of the bests on the Discovery album, but my emotional connection to it is disproportionate to its quality and exists pretty much only because of external circumstances. Just thought I should disclaim that before getting into this segment!
The camera spins as it zooms in on the Hedgeheg, conveying a sense of total freedom and omnidirectionality. It conveys that even more strongly by introducing us to Captain Sonic, Hero of Tealios, upside down as he spacewalks across the hull to give it some routine maintenance.
...actually, that looks like a floor-buffer he's applying to the hull. Is this guy waxing his spaceship? Oh my god I hope so that would be amazing.
As he waxes the hull, Sonic is singing along to a song (possibly Digital Love, possibly a different one that we can't hear) and air-guitaring with the handle of his ship buffer. Heh, he's dorky in the cute way. After doing a little figure skating-ish dance number with the buffer, he goes back through the airlock and takes off his suit. Same species as the people in need of his aid, with ruffled red hair and a sort of Harrison Ford Lite kind of vibe. After switching out his space suit for something more comfortable, he goes into his cabin, which is basically a shrine to the band that just got abducted. Posters and other merch of them everywhere. He also has some solo posters of Usagi specifically displayed in prominant locations.
This feels a little unnecessary, to be honest. Like, is the implication that he wouldn't be the one to call if the aliens abducted a different band? Does every Tealiosian celebrity have their own dedicated space ranger just in case they get Fire In the Sky'd?
I'm pretty sure the intent here is that Sonic is a superhero with a one-of-a-kind ship that they can't replicate. The guitar-symbol button was a pretty clear genre reference to the bat signal et al. And, to be fair, it kinda seems like their whole civilization is obsessed with this band, considering that the radar watchers were watching them instead of the damned radar. But still, if handling space-related emergencies is this guy's job, I feel like taking the time to establish him as a hyperfan like this is giving him an extra motivation that he really shouldn't need.
And, just to emphasize my point, Sonic then gazes longingly at a particular bootylicious poster of Usagi hanging over his cot and starts having this weird fantasy about them frolicking together in a five dimensional rose garden acid trip realm.
Zettai! Unmei! Mokushiroku!
Does it really add anything to the story that the rescuer wants to bone one of the rescuees?
It kind of feels like "Digital Love" (or at least its placement in the track order) just didn't fit the narrative they'd come up with to accommodate all the others songs, so they kind of forced this one sided romance angle in to try and make it kind of work. Unfortunately, I feel like this not only doesn't serve the story, but also, ironically, undermines the point of the song they included it for. Unlike most Daft Punk songs, "Digital Love" tells a story with its lyrics. Depending on how you interpret it, it's either a pair of separated lovers pining for each other, or two strangers having a romantic connection via dreams (or possibly cyberspace, if you take the lyrics more metaphorically and read more meaning into the title and sound design). Playing it over the erotic fantasy a fan is having about some pop star he's into kind of cheapens it. True, he's presumably about to go try to rescue her from an intergalactic warlord or whatever, which does make it a biiiiit more fitting, but then that also clashes with the fact that she's only one of the four people he needs to rescue. The focus until now was on the four band members. Now it's being narrowed to just one of them, for no good reason that I can see.
So yeah. All in all, I think this was the creators struggling for a best-fit between the song and the rest of the movie, and I don't think they quite pulled it off.
Well, be that as it may, Sonic gets pulled out of his Revolutionary Girl Uteala daydream by his ship's alarm suddenly blaring. Distress signal received! He jumps into a pilot's chair, which goes shooting up a track along his ship's very long "neck" and into the cockpit at the "head" of the guitar. There, he sees Radar Officer Linus' frantic message, along with some selected footage of the alien attack and abductions. Trembling with shock and rage, Sonic puts on his helmet, gets a sensor lock on the Shark as it's exiting the system, and puts his guitar-shaped vessel on a full speed intercept course.
sanic heghog fast over nine thousand lightspeeds per sanic
Wherever he got this seemingly-better-than-the-rest-of-his-planet's-techbase ship from, it's able to at least keep up with the Shark. At least, until the latter clears the gravity well and opens some kind of hyperspace portal, flying into which sends it back into intergalactic blazing white meteor mode. Sonic's ship apparently can't do that on its own, so he's forced to fly in after the Shark and use its own hyperportal to chase it as the song enters its high-instrumental final stage.
Turns out that hyperspace is a pretty hostile environment if your ship isn't designed for it, though. While the Shark sails smoothly along the vortex, the Hedgeheg has a lot of evasive maneuvers to do in order to avoid negative space debris or whatever those flashing blob-things are.
He'd better collect a lot of rings to make up for the hits he's taking in this zone.
As the Hedgeheg struggles its way through hyperspace, the Shark exits smoothly and safely, and enters its home system. That moon looks awfully like...oh. Well then.
So yeah, that's the big reveal, at least of the first part of this movie. The 5ecret 5tar 5ystem that the title is referring to, the one in which the 5tory mostly takes place, is actually 5ol. The intergalactic abductors are humans. Homo 5apiens. This could reflect poorly on our species, or it could just be proportionate retribution for Elvis; we'll have to see more before we can judge.
The Shark turns out to be capable of atmospheric entry after all as it descends toward Earth's surface. It also turns out to be capable of either outright shapeshifting, or some very convincing holographic trickery, because it disguises itself as a large passenger plane as it comes within sight of the ground. Even buzzing a panicking shepherd and his flock who have no idea why a fucking 747 would be so close to the ground so far from the nearest airport. Eventually, it does find an actual airport, albeit I highly doubt it's a public one.
The "jet" does a good performance of gliding down toward the runway before making a sneaky vertical landing at the very end that betrays its true nature. The soldiers quickly wheel the captured tealosians into a nondescript looking hangar building that I suspect is actually not remotely a hangar. Robotnik follows them out at a leisurely pace, but his face is still mostly hidden from us by a combination of shadows and glare.
It looks like this is either a black ops thing being done by a human government, or just a human supervillain and his lackeys acting on their own. The latter seems more likely at this point. Earth looks pretty much modern, and its easier to square that with a gadgeteer supervillain having a spaceship like that than it is with that being known technology available to governments. Also, I'm pretty sure Robotnik has always been an independent Lex Luther type, so this is just staying true to precedent.
Meanwhile, the pursuing vessel jerks its way out of hyperspace and practically tumbles through space after the Shark. It looks like Sonic actually went a little too fast this time! The hyperspace rigours did heavy damage to the Hedgeheg, and - as the songs final cords fade away - it ends up crashing on what may very well be a different continent.
This looks like South America, or maybe somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa. Based on the scenery and the look of the shepherd that Robotnik buzzed as he came in for a landing, hmm...well, my first thought was near the European Alps, but I guess it could have also been somewhere in Latin America. In the latter case, the crash might not be too far away. In the former, though, he's going to have quite the walk ahead of him.
Anyway. Hero, villain, and victims are all on the same planet. The story can go any number of ways from here. As for this sequence itself...the space chase and landing/crash scenes were good, and the twist about where the baddies are coming from was very well-done in its matter of fact execution, but the whole horny dream part still feels shoehorned and kind of skeevy. More of a mixed bag than the first two for sure. Then again, as I disclosed before, my feelings about the song may be causing me to hold its respective sequence to higher standards than the rest.
Track 4: "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger"
If you're old enough to remember the early 2000's, then you remember this song. I can't call it one of the most overplayed songs of the early aughts. That would be a pretty strong statement to make when Outkast's "Hey Ya" was a thing. It was still pretty easy to find though, and its over-the-top robotic sound - I'm talking over the topic robotic even by Daft Punk standards - made it pretty solid meme-fodder:
I don't know if it's the single Daft Punk song to have gotten the most saturation at the time. "Around the World" and/or "One More Time" may have beaten it out. But it was up there for sure.
Under that "hangar" they were brought into, the pods containing the abductees levitate down into a pointlessly huge subterranean facility. It's got a real Aperture Science vibe, both in terms of the needlessly large scale and overengineered fully automated everything, and in terms of aesthetic. Just leaning a little bit more pastel disco lights and a little less airport hallway. Moving with the beat of the music, the automated facility strips them (using lasers, because why do anything the easy way? ), scans them to get complete physiological blueprints, and then start probing their memories and recording them all to magnetic tape. Talk about schizotech.
After doing all the diagnostics, the machines then start modifying the copied memories into their closest possible human equivalents. Sting riding a hovercar under an alien sky as a kid is adjusted into him riding a wagon under our familiar sun. Usagi's own childhood memory of doing some kind of weird dancing game is replaced by her playing with a jump rope. Etc. These modified memories are then introduced back into their brains, overwriting the original versions. As long as none of them think too critically about any specific longterm memories and find the "plotholes" that don't work with Earth's history/geography/technology, they'll believe that they're human, and always have been human.
Well, until one of them tries to contact a family member or close friend. That would be pretty hard for Robotnik to produce a convincing fake for, even with his apparently vast resources and abilities.
While the brainwashing happens, other devices use the bioscans taken earlier to apply some retroviral therapy.
I wonder if there are any major internal differences that are harder to plaster over than skin color? If so, Robotnik's superfacility might be altering them for severely than it appears.
Also, it kind of amuses me that the whole system seems to be set up specifically to handle four people. Granted, his shapeshifting spaceship suggests that his tech has great self-adjustment ability, so he might have just told this facility to set itself for four as he was landing and had it comply within seconds. That kid of makes the overengineering even more ridiculous, though. It's still not as ridiculous as what happens next; rather than just getting their sizes and buying them some appropriate human clothing, Robotnik has decided to 3D print their new clothes into place around their damned bodies. Because, again, why do fucking ANYTHING the simple way? :/
The song ends with the alien musicians, now apparently human even to themselves, being levitated back up out of the Enrichment Center and woken from their chemically-induced stasis to meet their band's new agent and take a pretty elevator ride with him.
Now that we see him in full, he looks a little bit less Ivo "Eggman" Robotnik and a little bit more Ludwing von Beethoven.
This charade is only going to last for as long as it takes one of them to try to get in touch with family and friends, but Robotnik might not need them for very long. Why DOES he need them, anyway? He seems to like their music enough to track its radiocast to its source from galaxies away, but if that was it you'd think he'd just buy VIP tickets to their shows. So yeah, there's something more sinister (or at least zanier) going on than just that.
The repetitive, industrial sounds of "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" definitely work for this scene of human(oid)s being treated as assembly line products. The imagery and the music compliment each other well. But, both individually and as the sum of their parts, they really understate the horror of what's going on in the story. The details are complete silliness, of course - we're past SatAm cartoon logic and into something even further removed from reality at this point - but the concept here, the theme of what's going on, is extremely dark. The industrial commodification of people, mind body and soul, is probably the single greatest anxiety of the modern era. It's THE dominant theme in late twentieth and early twenty-first century horror media. The degree to which these four are being abused and exploited is straight out of a Phillip K. Dick fever dream or a Jordan Peele nightmare. But the actual imagery is just...really sanitized? The lasers cut their clothes off, but leave their underwear on so we can keep our PG rating. The physiological modifications are all squeaky clean and painless, performed via fast-acting biochemical agent that just needs to be sprayed on to start taking effect. Instead of something along the lines of Android Lust or "Schism" era Tool, it's the memey robot dance song.
Basically, I'm not sure if an interpretive animation of Daft Punk's "Discovery" could have ever been up to the task of selling this kind of horror.
This sequence is probably the best known part of Interstella 5555, just because the visual-musical sync is so good, and the technological aesthetic is so perfectly representative of Daft Punk's whole style. It's also very smoothly animated, with an impressive amount of detail that it frankly could have gotten away with omitting, but didn't overextend itself at all for the inclusion of.
It's very well done for what it is, but I feel like it's just not raw or graphic enough for what it's trying to be.
There's a brief, silent interlude, in which we see a cheerful looking record company tycoon receiving a sample of "One More Time." Smelling profit, he hurriedly dials the number that came with the sample.
Those office appliances look more 1993 than 2003. Notably, he's watching them play "One More Time" on a VHS tape. Is this supposed to be a period piece? Maybe this music magnate is just sort of an old fashioned dude.
He calls this new mystery band's "agent" back, spurring on the next song.
Track 5: "Crescendolls"
This is another purely instrumental track, with a steadily mounting drum and synth beat that manages to be both energizing, and kind of sinister and intimidating. As it revs itself up, Ludwig von Robotnik escorts the band into a plane to go meet a record magnate who's expressed interest in a contract. His henchmen have switched their EV suits for more conventional private security uniforms, but the body language and positioning heavily suggest that these are the same men who snatched them from Tealios.
None of the musicians seem to be curious about what that giant commercial-looking jet is doing here at this remote private airfield, just sitting on the runway and towering over their private plane. Maybe they're still dazed or drugged from the stasis and/or brainwashing.
They fly to a city - I think it's supposed to be NYC, but I'm not sure - and are driven to the record company. Their limo already has the band name "Crescendolls" plastered on it. I wonder if that's an English approximation of what their actual band name was back on Tealios and coincidentally had an appropriate meaning, or if Robotwig just picked it deliberately as a private sick joke. Anyway, the record guy is eager to meet them. From the reverence with which he bends down and shakes Robotwig's hand, I'm starting to get the impression that this isn't the first hot new talent he's brought to them, and that the previous ones were bigtime moneymakers.
How many times has he done this, I wonder? How many brainwashed alien musicians has he got dominating the music stores and AM/FM channels of Earth?
Is this just for the money? I mean, it makes no damned sense for a guy with this kind of technological lead on the rest of the world to need to pilfer the music industry to be the richest motherfucker on the planet, buuuuut that's sort of how it's always been with supervillains. Guys inventing robots and teleporters and invisibility cloaks that could revolutionize the world, and then just using them to rob banks or some shit. Obviously, Interstella 5555 is an impressionistic rendering of a story more than anything else, and it's leaning on superhero-adjacent tropes that presuppose that bad guys just do this regardless of how little sense it makes. I still hope that it's going to do something other than this though, because while it might be a genre convention, it is also a STUPID genre convention, and you can do an impressionist dream logic narrative that leans on less-dumb cliches than that one.
The record guy asks them to do a demonstration/recording session for him. None of the Crescendolls reply, but Robotwig obliges. It looks like there's a reason he had his men abduct their instruments along with themselves; he's either had the instruments reskinned to look like they were made on Earth, or just had a set of Earth instruments made that mimic their dimensions and tuning as much as possible so as to conserve the use of their muscle memories. Granted, he could have also anally probed the drum set, those two things aren't mutually exclusive.
The Crescendolls pick up the instruments and comply. Slowly. Vacantly. While wearing expressions like this one:
They don't know they've been abducted and enslaved, but they very obviously feel something wrong.
This recording/demo scene is kind of genius. In-universe, they're supposed to be doing a repeat of "One More Time," but the entirety of the scene has "Crescendolls" playing over it. Additionally, we see their fingers and hands moving on the instruments, and they're following the chords of "Crescendolls" as it plays over the scene, rather than doing different motions for a rendition of "One More Time" that we're not privy to. Rather than them playing the music, it feels like the music is playing them. Their miserable-looking faces and lifelessly animated bodies living up to the "doll" description, moving to an external beat just like the machines in the "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" scene.
A montage follows. They're given fake names and backgrounds; Robotwig has apparently decided that they're a band of mixed Euro-American origins, in their early twenties to early thirties, and named Stella (Usagi), Arpegius (Sting), Baryl (Charlie Brown), and Octave (Afro). Amusingly, their listed "dislikes" are stuff like "injustice" and "animals being hunted," super generic feelgood liberal stuff. As for the names: it's not clear if Robotwig picked the names out of a hat, or if he adapted their true names into normal-ish human ones, so as to minimize the dissonance. Like, their names are actually S'telha, Arpajjas, Brheel, and Oc-Tavoth or whatever. Anyway. "One More Time" climbs the charts worldwide, just as it did in real life in 2001. People dance to them all over the world. They appear on posters, doing cold, miserable versions of the same poses and silhouettes they did for their own posters back on Tealios. They appear on talk shows, but Robotwig is there to do most of the talking for them.
He's also there with them at the album signings. Doing most of the talking. Guiding them. Shepherding them. Seeming to just baaaarely manage to avoid overplaying his hand and making everyone wonder what the fuck is up with this famous band acting like zombies enslaved by a necromancer agent. That's a different anime, after all, and Robotwig doesn't want to confuse anyone.
It seems like a good bit of time is passing, but the abductees don't get any less passive and lethargic. I was starting to wonder if he's been keeping them drugged or something, but then the animation started emphasizing the personalized sunglasses he has them all wearing. In the "Harder, Stronger..." sequence, those glasses were sort of built around the brainwashing devices that he used to overwrite their memories with the modified versions. And, every once in a while, one of the four will seem to start having a moment of introspection or lucidity, only for the glasses to flash, a modified memory to play over their faces, and them to return to their obedient stupor. So, that's how he's keeping them from, eg, trying to visit their families or the like. It also will probably be how Sonic will free them; remove the glasses, and the cognitive dissonance will start setting in and the brainwashing will break.
Unfortunately, we haven't seen Sonic since he crashed in the jungle. It's been at least a couple of months since then. I hope he hasn't spent them getting dissected in Area 51 or something.
The final, fractal repetitions of the drumbs and synth play over the Crescendolls and their master being interviewed at the record company head office as "One More Time" reaches the number one spot. The camera flashes cast their shadows over the wall behind them, with Robotwig's overlapping all others and silhouetting itself against a map of the world that the record tycoon has hanging up.
World domination via techno-pop? Frankly, if he wants to conquer the world I'm not sure why he needs techno-pop to do it. The inventions he's sitting on are such that brute force should be the easiest option for him, unless Earth has a Justice League equivalent who'd be ready to pounce on something that obvious. Also, "conquering Earth" doesn't really work as stakes for this story, since the only characters we've been made to care about are from someplace else. Still, this visual symbolism strongly suggests that he isn't just trying to inefficiently make money off of captured alien musicians, so we're at least one step above my initial (uncharitable, it now seems) theory. So, it may be that the story will surprise me again, and his plan really won't be something he could just do by holding cities hostage from orbit, with his shadow looming over Earth just acting as a microcosm of stakes more suitable for a galaxy-hopping narrative.
That's five out of fourteen tracks on the album, and a little over a third of the movie's runtime. I might have to make this six parts instead of four or five, at this rate. But anyway, this is a good stopping point for now.
