The fake king of Eldian is removed by the military in a coup d’etat. The real king is Rod Reiss, whose family has the ability to control the Titans. The last remaining descendant of the Reiss family, Historia, refuses to transform into a Titan and eat Eren to get his powers, so Reiss drinks the Titan liquid and transforms into a giant, unstable Titan, but is killed when trying to attack the city. Historia is thus chosen as the new Queen. The troop then goes to the outer wall to recapture it from the Titans, but fall into an ambush led by the Beast Titan. In a dangerous move, Levi is able to remove the man inside the Beast Titan and save the troop from death. Eren and the soldiers go to the remains of his destroyed house, and find the notes of Eren’s father Grisha—revealing the truth about the lost history of Eldian: a long time ago, the Reiss family obtained the Titan powers to give Eldians the super weapon to invade and annex Marley from overseas. However, Marleyans rebelled, fought back and expulsed Eldians back to the island. The Reiss family errected walls around Eldia and used Titan powers to erase the memory of its citizens, falsely claiming that all humankind outside the wall was killed by the Titans. Upon hearing this, Eldians are shocked.
The 3rd season of the “Attack on Titan” anime series reached a threshold of improvement: while the first two seasons tended to just (obviously) overstretch the story through repetitive, albeit epic action fights of people with the 30ft tall Titans, running in circles, here the story finally started to progress and go somewhere. Likewise, the animation is stunning, and even more detailed than before—if that is even possible—whereas even the action and battle sequences seem to reach a new level. One of them is undeniably the passionately directed, ‘tour-de-force’ battle spanning four episodes (episodes 50-53, aka 3.13-3.17), in which Levi, Armin, Eren, Mikasa, and the other scouts enter the outer wall to recapture it, but find it empty, only for the Beast Titan and his dozen Titans to surround them in an ambush outside, by throwing a boulder on the exit of the wall, trapping them. The shot compositions, in which the contrast between the small humans and the giant Titans interact, comes to full expression in this segment, whereas every single little detail is a masterclass on its own, from Armin figuring out the enemy left a long time ago based on their remaining cooking pots which are cold, up to the daring suicide march of the soldiers towards the Beast Titan, chanting (“It’s us who give meaning to our comrades’ lives! The brave fallen! The anguished fallen! The ones who will remember them are us, the living. We die, trusting the living who follow to find the meaning in our lives!”), all done with a lot of pathos. The only exception is the too simple, convenient way they find a solution to break out of this ambush.
The character developments are again just “minimal”, while the dialogues tend to be standard, yet there are some refreshing moments here: for instance, Levi captures two Royalist henchmen, and ties one up to a chair in the interrogation room, but ostensibly leaves the door open, so that the first henchman can overhear the other henchman talking how he revealed all the secrets to avoid torture, and that the first one is a sucker. The first henchman thus admits that Reiss is the true king, giving up on loyalty. However, the second henchman was just reading out loud a script prepared beforehand by the Scouts, who tricked the first one. Pretty clever. The finale is the highlight, though. The reveal of all the secrets and the hidden background of the people of Eldia and Marley in episodes 56-59 (aka 3.19-3.22) is unique and fascinating, combining the historical analogy of Imperial Japanese invasion of China; isolationism and deliberate illiteracy of a closed society of North Korea; fleeing to alternate reality by the weak-minded who cannot cope with real life responsibilities; discrimination and persecution of Jews in ghettoes during WWII; and the Faustian bargain through lust for absolute power and domination by using Titans as super weapons reminiscent of the alternative version of the giant fire demons in Miyazaki’s “Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind”. All this is combined into a grand theme of two groups trying to alternately rule and subjugate each other in a vicious circle of destruction, instead of learning from history and renouncing these impulses of irredentism and ethno-nationalistic supremacy within themselves, accepting equal status for all. Truly, an unrepeatable highlight of the author Hajime Isamaya. Pompous and bombastic, but also grounded and philosophical at times, season 3 stands as a titan among the “Attack on Titan” seasons.
Grade:+++
No comments:
Post a Comment