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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
the CIA and Tokyo suffer massive monster attacks, July 4, 2010
This review is from: Red/Tokyo Storm Warning (Paperback)
Let monsters sleep. If only the CIA would abide by this smidgen of wisdom. But the agency is under new management, the new Director undergoing orientation. Part of this orientation includes the disclosure of top secret files featuring a CIA operative whose sanctioned activities are so vile, the appalled new Director there and then decides that this man must be terminated, his files expunged. This, even though the operative had long since retired and gotten old. Let monsters sleep. Let Paul Moses alone. But the CIA doesn't.
In his twilight years Paul Moses prefers living in seclusion. He indulges in the occasional phone conversation with his friendly CIA case worker and he dotes on his little niece. And because he's done some really awful stuff in his past, he sometimes wallows in guilt. Paul Moses has kept mum. It was promised he'd be left alone, that was part of the deal. One evening the assassins come for him.
In the genre of "mindless violence" comics, RED rates highly. Except that the "mindless violence" tag is tempered somewhat by Warren Ellis's infusion of some nice characterization work. Paul Moses isn't what you'd call a sympathetic protagonist. He's absolutely an anti-hero, and whatever remorse was haunting him sort of goes away once he's attacked by the CIA. But, in one sense, you do know where he's coming from, why he chooses to exact revenge. It's one of those code of honor things. There are only four characters of note here - and a bunch of CIA goons whom Moses soon converts into dead meat - but the most interesting character is probably Michael Beesley, the politically assigned new Director of CIA. As the catalyst of Moses's murder spree, Beesley is at first self-righteous, but then he progressively gets more weasely and cowering as his target just plain refuses to get bumped off. I do admit to a sense of gratification at the guy's cringing.
Cully Hamner's expressive artwork lends itself well to all the graphic bloodletting, and you get a sense of just how unstoppable and friggin' ornery the old guy is. There's an inexorability in how Moses goes about his cold-blooded killings; it borders on the chilling. Moses sees himself as a monster. I really couldn't see how this story would end well.
RED has been optioned for a film adaptation starring Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman and Hellen Mirren. I hope, in the movie, the CIA Director, for his sake, thinks it thru before he acts. But of course he won't.
This trade paperback, RED/TOKYO STORM WARNING, collects two of Warren Ellis's limited series: RED #1-3 and TOKYO STORM WARNING #1-3. Of these two, TOKYO STORM WARNING is the lesser series, even though the story is told on a much grander scale. Here, Ellis plays around with the Japanese fascination with giant monsters and colossal battle robots, and, in Zoe Flynn, he provides an American point of view.
In an alternate reality, in the last gasps of the second world war, the atomic bomb instead dropped on Tokyo. Afterwards, giant monsters suddenly began surfacing to plague the city like clockwork. Tokyo establishes the ARCangel project, making use of colossal battle robots to combat the monster attacks. We learn that, over the past decades, mysterious highly advanced weaponry have materialized out of thin air, and that these robot constructs were part and parcel of this. The best of Tokyo's brains have shakily adapted these robots for human interface. American test pilot Zoe Flynn, in a sort of exchange program, arrives to man ARCangel Three, and none too soon. Moments after her arrival at Tokyo, a monster emerges and Zoe receives the quickest indoctrination ever. She suits up.
TOKYO STORM WARNING could've been so much better instead of the fluff read it is. Warren Ellis establishes an intriguing sense of mystery with this series. Where are all these monsters coming from? For that matter, where is all this new tech coming from? And just what secret is being so strenuously safeguarded in the Terminal Command buried many levels below the surface? I was even expecting that Megashogun standing inert in the streets to be activated before the story's over. It's also fascinating to note the Japanese people's reaction to all the crazy that's been going on for years.
Ellis also deals with the sort of devastation an all-out skirmish between a giant robot and monster would inflict. Zoe's robot collides with a building and, of course, the casualties would be horrific. When Zoe eviscerates a monster, this releases copious floods of monster blood gushing on the streets, drowning who knows how many Tokyo residents.
Unfortunately, artist James Raiz isn't up to the task. His stuff looks really busy, and you have to scan long and hard just to figure out exactly what it is you're eyeballing. The mecha robots aren't clearly delineated, their parts blending in with those of fellow robots or into the scenery or with the monsters. I got frustrated. It downgraded the reading experience. This one probably won't be made into a movie.
4 stars out of 5 for RED. 2 stars for TOKYO STORM WARNING.
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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Graphic SF Reader, September 2, 2007
This review is from: Red/Tokyo Storm Warning (Paperback)
Red is the story of a retired spy, and more particularly a very talented wetwork sort of guy, who had a deal to retire quietly, keep to himself, and he would be left alone. Management changes at the CIA, and they decide to get rid of him. Big mistake for those involved with this decision.
Tokyo Storm Warning is a crazy Japanese style giant robot slugfest, where one poor little human woman has to try and avoid getting stomped on. Ok, she is a pilot type, so she isn't your average female.
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3 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Flimsy, Silly, Gorgeous, Stupid, May 15, 2006
This review is from: Red/Tokyo Storm Warning (Paperback)
The first thing to note about this book is that it contains two very different stories with two very different artistic portrayals, sharing Warren Ellis as the author. Thus you have to evaluate the two stories on their own merits, which is sort of hard to do in a combined review.
Fortunately for the review (and unfortunately for my brain), Wildstorm decided to make that easier by packing two of the worst things Ellis has ever written into one slim volume.
First, the story that prompted me to seek out this book, we have Tokyo Storm Warning. I cannot advise people enough: do not read this piece of execrable trash. DO NOT READ IT. The so-called narrative in Tokyo Storm Warning is bad enough that I suspect it could lead to lesions on the brain, and with repeat absorption, liquefy your frontal lobes entirely. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
The art, on the other hand, is superb, if a bit busy. Giant robot action is very well handled by James Raiz and Andrew Currie, and the coloring work is also quite nice.
Tokyo Storm Warning reminds me of the early days of pornography in the United States; after the Supreme Court declared that something couldn't be considered entirely obscene, on a federal level, if it had 'literary' value, you saw magazines like Playboy spring ex nihilo onto the national landscape, with the requisite amount of fiction, interview, commentary, jokes, etc, by as many known authors as they could get their hands on. It was a flimsy legal excuse to peddle nude pictures, but it worked. Tokyo Storm Warning feels like it went through a similar creative process, whereby Wildstorm found itself in possession of some artists who could do giant robot/mechanical art very well, and needed a story, however tissue paper thin, from a known author, in order to peddle the art. Thus Warren Ellis, presumably in withdrawal from nicotine or some such, scribbled out, in crayon or bodily fluid, what almost has to be the single worst thing he's ever written (short of perhaps grade school "What I Did This Summer" essays), it was put to glossy paper, and sold to unsuspecting victims around the world. Blech.
If you can just look at the pretty pictures, or don't read English, it would come across a *lot* better.
Red is the second story, which while being better in the same way that a quick death is better than being eaten by pit bulls, still taxes reason in a way dangerous to the moral fiber of a nation. A mish-mash of every posturing, man's-man action movie trope you can imagine, it could pass for a very bad screenplay from an early Arnold Schwarzenegger movie if you squint at it sideways. It's basically the story of a super-killer CIA agent who comes out of retirement to seek revenge on a namby-pampy, liberal cypher appointed CIA Director who, upon seeing all the horrible things he did in the Service of His Nation, orders him killed. Blah. Campaign of violence. Blah, Blah. Elaborate revenge plot. Blah, Blah, Blah. Speech about being a 'real man'. Etc. It's the fictional equivalent of steroid abuse, i.e., too much mental testosterone.
The art in Red complements the marginally better story by being bland, unappealing and dull. Thus it *almost* manages to tie with Tokyo Storm Warning as a sequential-art abortion. But not quite, because TSW serves as the high water mark for what a great artist/writer team can do when they're completely phoning it in. In some future textbook it will serve as a cautionary tale about relying too much on raw, unmotivated skill.
In short: avoid this book at all costs, except for the pretty giant robot pictures.
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