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Explorer Woman Ray
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Title Info
- seen: 1-2 of 2
- type: OAV
- grade: flawed
- made: 1989
- Review created: Recently, but I didn't record the date.
- mod: none
It is not a crime to draw inspiration from the whole Indiana Jones, Raiders of the lost ark thing, but it should be a crime to do it this badly. Effectively this version of Indiana Jones is female, add two young girls for comedy relief (and a desperate attempt to add character). Villainy provided by a educated, decadent fop and a dumb human mountain who are straight out of Raiders. Combine this with one `ancient unexplored temple' per episode, which has all the realism of a theme park attraction and conveniently explodes at the end of the episode.
In other words it doesn't even have enough originality to be bad, merely feeling like a very uninspired derivative. This is made worse by the `message' of the movie, which (similar to Raiders) is basically don't mess with the toys of the ancients. Especially not these ancients, as they seem to alternate between primitive stonework and star trek level super technology. Meanwhile modern technology doesn't even seem to be able to provide the lead female with a sports bra (something she definitely needs). There are signs of quality, the opening scene is good, the two girls are fun (but unneccesary and very familiar) and the less than enthusiastic leader of the `bad guy goon squad' is cooler than his bit part deserves, but this isn't nearly enough to redeem it. The rest is all illogical and improbable stunts, tense stand-offs that aren't and tedious dialog.
The animation is amazingly, impressively average. It's not bad, but it is lifeless and unimpressive. The attempts to be epic or impressive, or even comical, don't work because they simply don't make sense. The action scenes are alright, but suffer from similar problems. They also rely on some sort of understanding that no one will actually use a gun, no matter how many dumb moves the opponent makes. The voices are fairly unsubtle and the vain attempt of the music to suggest excitement so obvious as to draw attention to the failings. The biggest shame is that this animation and production is sufficiently good it could have been put to better use than this.
None of the sites I source from had a review of this title.
Words by Andrew Shelton, Web by Ticti, Last Compile: Wed Aug 5 12:39:18 WST 2009