The Sky Crawlers

Surprisingly, given the idyllic scenery, Mamoru Oshii's The Sky Crawlers ends up being something of a companion piece to the director's two citified Ghost in the Shell films. Premised on an unending tit-for-tat war fought exclusively in the skies by chain-smoking teenagers, Oshii's film is another examination of what it is to be somebody who has slipped out of alignment with the rest of humanity. Sky Crawlers' spotted dogfights, arriving with the unhurried progression of serialised television, set small teams of aircraft - some of which look like chromed and customised Spitfires; others closer to Japanese prototype craft, by way of the player ship from Sega Saturn shooter Battle Garegga - against each other for no clear tactical advantage. The people steering these planes are adolescents with stock personalities; children arrested in physically and emotionally underdeveloped bodies who are, given the facile nature of the indulgencies available to them, prisoners in their very own Land of Toys.

Although housed in a lush Irish countryside and clearly based on a British World War II era barracks, common rooms come complete with enormous (and incongruously modern) refrigerators, packed with bottled lager. A cheap way to manage these already docile youngsters. Similarly, sex workers from a nearby brothel are available to the boys - and they are boys, rather than men - initiating them into a safe but emotionally inert approximation of adulthood. Everything in The Sky Crawlers reeks of this tranquilised façade, even down to the towns and cities that the children are briefly permitted to interact with. The local diner is staffed by extras who serve up anachronistic delicacies, while the one city we see is little more than a barren playground. Prior to one particularly enormous sortie, the team billet in an undamaged central European sprawl filled with restaurants that require no patrons and a bowling alley that just so happens to attract a small group of excitable women, happy to whisk away one of these hotshot pilots. Glacially paced, Sky Crawlers has the somnambular rhythms of a Soviet science fiction film. Like, say, a Solaris, that which initially appears cold and emotionally impenetrable eventually takes on a hypnotic quality, leaving the viewer feeling unusually bereft when the film reaches its conclusion.