Gantz #8:
Death Watch

100 minutes
English/Japanese
English Subtitles
Released: 10/11/2005
Reviewed: 12/27/2005

I think I have a problem in my brain.

Har har har. I can imagine what you're saying already. "We knew that, Dave!" Well who needs ya! I wasn't talking about that! What I was talking about was how I haven't really watched any sort of anime casually in about five years, right back when I started doing this thing on a regular basis. It just seems genuinely unproductive to watch a Japanese cartoon and not splatter my opinion all over the internet for everyone to see. Adding fuel to this fire is the fact that most anime I see I just plain don't like, so if I get to write something out of it it just feels like I haven't completely wasted my time. Mostly wasted my time, sure, but not all the way 100% wasted. I need an excuse as to why I watch so much crap and writing about it seems as good of one as any.

Once again Gantz deposits me soundly in the middle ground. After writing about this show seven times, for the better part of a year, I'm sort of just getting tired of doing it. But for some reason the show just keeps drawing me back, and if it keeps drawing me back then I might as well keep writing about it because, well, dangit... it's just too convenient that it should work out that way! But regardless, I'm glad that there's only a few DVDs left of this show because I'm tired of this entertainment tug-o-war it plays with my heart. Each episode makes me alternative love or hate the show. And more and more I'm finding that there's little middle ground to take where Gantz is concerned.

The rise and fall of Gantz entertainment is not unlike that of our terrestrial tides. Incredibly boring or overzealous sequences are cast in a more moderate light by the existence of 'plain jane' moments of an almost touching emotion. Plus there's some serious action where dudes are flipping all over the place and karate kicking people and shooting laser guns. It's all very cool, provided you can skirt the weirdo stuff. I've talked about this before.

(<---- Best picture ever made, dood)

I guess what's really got me about Gantz is that I'm too easily attached to bitchy, unlikeable characters. And in their own way all the cast of Gantz are bitchy, unlikeable characters. But once they've dug their hooks into me it's just too late. So I can watch Sei, the sultry lady pictured left, get all melodramatic about how she and her new bang-buddy Kurono are gonna go for a drive together and I know it sounds excessively lame -- we're talking so lame it hurts my eyes -- but it's never enough to push me away. Hey, at least it's better than those icky "moe" shows where the chicks all look twelve and have big eyes and are totally subservient to their "older brother". Creeeeeepy. Gantz skirts those issues and replaces then with the wholesome sex and gore that we all know and love. In between there are these bizarrely out of place explosions of emotion that totally broadside you. I'm like Gantz's whipping boy now. No matter what they say, I've come this far. I've got to make it to the end. It's like when you're eating a really bad sandwich (as if such a thing could exist!). You don't want to throw it away 3/4s of the way through. That's wasteful!

So Gantz is wearing me out, man. What about you dear reader? Have you made it anywhere in this series? Have you even picked it up? There's almost nothing out there that I want to immediately pop in the next volume after polishing off three straight episodes, even my much adored Bubblegum Crisis 2040 couldn't make me do that, but Gantz managed to dig it's teeth into me. So you can imagine how I feel. Watching six episodes in a row, totaling something like 2 hours of my time, is almost impossible for someone like me, with a brain so riddled by ADHD it might as well be made of Swiss cheese. Even if Gantz was the worst show ever, and at times you might feel like it is, they sure understand how to make a dang good cliffhanger.

I'll save my thoughts on volume 9 for next week. It's a doozy, I'll tell you that much.