Steins;Gate Blu-ray Review
Is that a banana in your microwave, or are you just happy to be time traveling?
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, September 16, 2012
Two relatively recent quick casualties in the ever unpredictable world of series television were the American reboot of
Life on Mars and
Awake. Both series featured a hero who had suffered an unfortunate car accident and
whose subsequent life was torn asunder as a result. In the case of
Life on Mars, the hero suddenly found
himself transported back in time several decades, while in the case of
Awake, the hero found himself shuttling
between two distinct realities. There's no car accident in
Steins;Gate; instead, there's a horrifying collision of a
satellite which has fallen into a skyscraper and whose descent from the heavens may have precipitated a bizarre set of
phenomena that the series' hero, Rintarō Okabe, begins experiencing. Then again, Okabe's strange affliction (which
will be detailed below) may be due to his jiggered microwave, which this self-proclaimed "mad scientist" had altered to
help prove his theories on time travel. One way or the other, Okabe finds himself more and more confused as one set
of memories he clearly recalls doesn't seemed to be shared by any of his friends, and several weird things occur that
lead Okabe to believe he may either be time traveling or at the very least shuttling between two alternate realities.
Steins;Gate is another anime culled from a visual novel game and follows in the footsteps of
Chaos;Head
, both having been produced in their game forms by 5pb and Nitroplus. Though there are some fairly tangential
threads tying both properties together, there's no real requirement to experience
Chaos;Head in order to wend
the thorny path that
Steins;Gate offers.
Steins;Gate is a smartly written, if just occasionally slightly
annoying, trip through several hoary science fiction tropes, but it manages to invest what might have been a cliché
ridden enterprise into something quite ingenious at times. Okabe is certainly one of the most unusual anime heroes in
recent memory, an obsessive soul who is prone to cackle manically at inopportune moments and whose theories aren't
exactly supported by anything approaching a traditional scientific method. When one of the timelines Okabe finds
himself shuttling through involves the apparent murder of a beautiful and intelligent female time travel enthusiast,
Kurisu Makise, a murder which Okabe himself may have committed, the earnest young man sets out to figure out what
exactly is going on.
Does anyone even use a semicolon anymore? One of my proudest moments in college was in my Film Theory class
when
my teacher (who now heads one of the biggest film schools in the country) asked us to write an off the cuff essay about
our favorite film. For reasons I can't quite recall, I didn't choose any likely suspect like
Citizen Kane or
8
½,
but instead concentrated on Bob Fosse's
Sweet Charity (ah, the vagaries of youth), and I utilized a semicolon
somewhere in my writing. When I got the paper back, there was a huge "A+" emblazoned across the top of the paper,
along with the somewhat funny note, "Correct use of a semicolon! Impressive! Bonus points!" While the patently
weird
inclusion of the semicolon in both
Chaos;Head and
Steins;Gate may not be much more than a
typographic
conceit, it actually helps to point out the slightly "fractured" structure of both shows. And in that regard,
Steins;Gate probably takes the cake, as the series is told resolutely from Okabe's point of view, meaning that
the
viewer is often just as confused and off kilter as the series' hero is.
Anyone who has ever dreamed of time travel has no doubt fantasized about going into the past and altering history,
either for altruistic reasons (think of that great old
Twilight Zone episode where Russell Johnson, the actor who
go on to "greater" fame and glory as the Professor on
Gilligan's Island, attempted to prevent the assassination
of President Lincoln), or perhaps for more venal, personal reasons. Both of these approaches rear their heads
throughout
Steins;Gate in often fascinating ways. Okabe of course is trying to figure out why he has seen
Kurisu lying dead in a pool of blood, apparently murdered, even while at the "same time" Kurisu seems to be alive and
kicking and in fact ultimately joins Okabe's kind of geek-fest lab. On another level, though, a whole convoluted corollary
time traveling arc injects itself when Okabe's investigations lead him to the mysterious John Titor, a man whose own
time traveling expeditions may in fact be interconnected with what Okabe has been experiencing.
Steins;Gate is easily one of the most densely plotted anime to come down the pike over the past several years.
It's a different kind of opaqueness than, say, the
Ghost in the Shell franchise, one less concerned with
philosophizing than with the intricacies that arise when one really begins to ruminate about the ins and outs of time
travel. This first volume gets us about halfway through the series, and by the end of this volume's episodes, the series
has begun a rather radical shift from a kind of goofy
ethos to something that seems a good deal more dark and
sinister. I for one can't wait to see where Okabe travels next and what rippling repercussions ring out into various
timelines as a result.
