Review: Kaiju Score
If you are planning a heist, there is one thing that really improves your chances of success: a distraction. And the bigger the prize, the bigger the security surrounding it, so you're going to need a really big distraction...
And they don't come much bigger than a kaiju!
Kaiju: a large (and I mean really huge, bigger than a tall building) monster in the Japanese tokusatu sci-fi movie tradition (involving lots of special effects, action and drama). A kaiju can be a mutant created by nuclear energy (ie: Godzilla, the original), a prehistoric beast thawing from a glacier, an alien behemoth, etc... The origin is less important than what follows, which is the creature's inevitable rampage through a heavily-populated city, full of screaming civilians as the military tries, in vain, to halt its advance.
Bad for business, bad for the city's infrastructure, certainly, but a humungous scaly reptile crushing tower blocks as it lumbers dumbly forward sure is extremely distracting. If a person was planning to steal millions of dollars worth of fine art from a heavily-fortified vault - a fairly time-consuming operation which, it hardly needs to be said, goes a heck of a lot smoother when everyone is looking the other way - a huge, terrifying kaiju is exactly what you want.
Just one problem: these beasties are not exactly easy to influence. You can't just find one and give it a hopeful shove in the direction you want it to move. The plan depends upon one of these horrors just conveniently being in the right place at the right time, and these creatures are unpredictable.
Or are they?
In Kaiju Score by writer James Patrick and artist Rem Broo heist planner Marco has very much done his homework. The migration patterns of kaiju follow those of their main food source, the humble mullet fish. By studying one, he can predict the other. When your team needs time and space to do their thing, an evacuated city is the ideal scenario.
It's a cool combo of two genres that have never collided before, and played with tongue very much in cheek. Marco needs a team to pull off his project, and also a patron to finance it. The problem is that his reputation is not good: his operations tend to go south because of an overlooked detail. He really needs a break.
Mega-rich loanshark Blackie is willing to bankroll the affair, but the stakes are high: failure will be punished by death, and not a quick one either. With equipment guy Palmiero (very good at what he does but notoriously unlucky) and safe-cracker Gina (haughty glamorous ball-breaker), with Blackie's 'babysitter' Pierson (trigger-happy double-crossing thug), the gig is on.
This time, everything will work out perfectly. Because it absolutely has to! This time there will be no slip-ups. He's thought of everything ... Right?
This is a fun ride with deliciously amoral antiheroes you can't help rooting for. Marco is a guy with talent and ambition who tries and fails despite his great potential. Ultimately he has no-one to blame but himself: he has the ability but never quite puts in enough work to make his dreams a reality. It's an existential dilemma much more horrific than a 100-foot tall dinosaur, and many readers will empathise.
Broo delivers the visuals with great polish, all the monsters - of both the human and non-human variety - larger than life. As random variables pop up and Marco's best laid plans inevitably fall apart yet again right before his eyes, desperate improvisation is called for. This is where the story really kicks in.
Dealing with change on the go is a vital life skill because life itself is not something which can be perfectly predicted. Here it also raises even deeper questions: maybe what you really have to change is yourself and your choices. Marco is approaching an epiphany...
With no way of telling what will happen next, the story takes on a life of its own, its path as reckless as that of the kaiju itself. Can Marco pull it off this time? This is his last chance to turn things around.
Everything has to work out, and it will, unless some really, really big random variable pops up...
Zak Webber
Twitter - @sfcomicartist Instagram - @sfcomicartist
JOIN US ON FACEBOOK! - SCI-FI COMIC NEXUS
*****
***
*
Comments
Post a Comment