The experience of watching The Sky Crawlers (Oshii Mamoru) is like visiting a Buddhist temple with an attached video game room. While one gets to be enthralled by some of the most stunningly animated dogfight sequences, other parts of the film slow to a crawl by depicting the routine daily life at the airbase. And Oshii was obviously stingy with the time allocation to video game as oppose to meditating. I can almost hearing the snoring in the cinema when audience has to endure disproportionately long depiction of mundane and repetitive stuff for short moments of explosive aerial action.
That is of course the message itself. Instead of just embedding it within the film through images and sound, Oshii conveyed it by inflicting it upon the audience.
As laid out as part of The Four Noble Truths (四諦) in Budhism, human beings' crave for sensual pleasure, extermination and existence is the origin of sufferings.
Thus, in the alternate reality of the film where world peace is attained, human created the war game industry when two companies were contracted to fight each other, for consumption;
Thus, the pilots were recruited from a species who remain forever young and can be reincarnated after death and be sent back into 'combat';
Thus, the excruciating pain when the species fell in love, carried on with the meaningless 'killings', be killed, reborn with no memory retained, sent back to the same base and carry on with the routine life.
Thus, I was watching the rotating wheel go round, intentionally embedded by Oshii or not.
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