Ok, so the comparison isn’t as blatant as me claiming Mao is Steven Seagal, but hear me out.
The new Darker than Black OAV episode starts with an action scene that’s only loosely connected to the following scenes. Hei’s fighting some Syndicate contractors in the middle of an industrial area. It’s a pretty bad-ass action scene that showcases Hei’s talents while tossing some interesting one-off villains his way. It plays a lot like an opening sequence to a James Bond flick. James Bond takes on some baddies in a sequence that is loosely connected to the movie’s plot (At best. Usually it’s a completely different scenario.). He gets to show off his awesomeness and kick some ass, whether it’s skiing down a mountain, shooting bad guys, and parachuting off a cliff in The Spy Who Loved Me or the opening of Goldfinger that sums up the James Bond experience in one 4 minute sequence.
I got the same vibe from the opening to this OAV. Many of James Bond’s opening scenes back in the day involved Bond taking on some SPECTRE contengent, while here we see Hei dealing with some Syndicate assassins. Hei handles them with ease the same way Bond handles his foes. Both scenes also show that there’s more to each character’s overarcing story than whatever story happens to be showcased in the latest series/episode/movie. Both characters are larger than their immediate context. Bond is embroiled in various conflicts (The Cold War for most of his movies, various other conflicts since Liscense to Kill) and Hei is deep in the overall Contractor/Gate conspiracy/conflict. This helps cement my idea that there’s far more to Darker than Black than “what are the Gates,” “what are Contractors,” and all of the other questions that people focus upon.
The scene after the opening also felt very “Bond-ish” to me. When Hei and Yin arrive at the shoreside resort, Hei does a thorough search of their room to look for wiretaps or anyone that may be waitin to ambush them. If you watch a Bond flick, you’ve seen this scene before. Bond arrives at some Carribean resort and carefully searches the room for trouble. Sometimes he finds someone waiting with a sap or a gun, sometimes he doesn’t. The fact that Hei’s stay at the resort results in him running into his current nemesis was also very Bond-like. Bond usually tracks down his prey to some resort in order to gather information. While Hei is on the opposite side of said situation in this episode, it’s still following many of the same vibes.
So yeah, this first Darker than Black OAV played a lot like a James Bond movie. All we needed was a sexy title sequence sung by Shirey Bassey set to images of hot, naked dancing Contractor chicks. I demand that for the next episode. Make it so, Bones!
Also: Very happy that we won’t be seeing Suou. God, she was such an awful character.
No comments:
Post a Comment