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R2 DVD Reviews
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Friday, 25 November 2011 00:00 |
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 Here's a rare thing: a series that I'd barely even heard of before the discs arrived on the doorstep. I certainly had no idea what to expect from it - an unusual thing with DVDs these days, and in this case leading to a very pleasant surprise, as it's really rather good...
In a future world where an organization called GGP (the Global Government Plan) has taken control of the world, Rin Ogata was a promising up-and-coming ballet dancer, but a serious injury unfortunately put paid to her plans for a ballet career. Years later in college, she comes across a club building, and soon finds herself intrigued by a transforming motorcycle-like vehicle called a Rideback - a machine that her unique ballet skills (with her balance and finesse) make her a born natural to ride. Which she finds out when she goes for a spin on an out-of-control Rideback. But her new-found love for the Rideback experience soon leads her into trouble, when her own eagerness gets the better of her and leads to her being mistaken for a member of a terrorist group...
Rin's now-dead mother Yuki was a famous ballerina, and she got her love for the stage from her - it was always her dream to be as good as, or maybe even surpass, Yuki - but injury put paid to that, and now she's a simple drama student. College room-mate and childhood friend Shoko understands what effect that's had on her friend; new college classmate Suzuri, a big fan of Rin's dancing, doesn't even realise initially that her dancing days are over. Dancing has been all around her, and giving that up is hard to do - so finding the Ridebacks, whose complex control programmes and four-limbed design means that, in the right hands, they can almost dance themselves, quickly gives Rin something that could fill the gap in her life.
Cut from the characters to our world of the future. From humble beginnings, the Global Goverment Plan created an uprising that eventually led to them being accepted by the United Nations as a legitimate global government. While national governments still exist and are nominally democratic, the GPP sit above them, holding the final world, a de facto military dictatorship using means fair and foul to ensure peace and their own position. However good their initial intentions may have been, there is now opposition to the GPP from some departments - most notable, as far as we're concerned, from the BMA, a terrorist group operating in Japan to undermine GPP there. BMA's fighters use Ridebacks; when Shoko is caught up in a hostage situation, Rin uses her own Rideback to go and rescue her - in the process getting herself mistaken for a BMA member. And it's all downhill from there, as events spiral out of control, dragging in friends and family.
In a way, I made a bit of mistake with Rideback in assuming that it would mostly be about the riding - while the opening episodes would reinforce that idea (especially when Rin gets roped into a competitive race with club president Tamayo), that's really just a hook to get Rin involved. The main thrust of the story is the power of friendship, and how that combined with a bad habit of acting on impulse gets Rin into a situation that's way over her head. She has an eagerness to do the right thing about her, but repeatedly through the series it only serves to get her deeper into trouble, with resulting consequences for those around her, and you can't help but feel sorry for her.
If you stick to just the characters on offer and the situations they find themselves in, then Rideback really is surprisingly good: Rin's problems as detailed above, the efforts of her friends to help her, a parallel plot about a long-running grudge between the GGP's local representative and two men who served under him during its rise to power and who now fight for the opposition - there's a lot going on, with trust and the betrayal of it playing a large part in what's going on. The characters are believable in what they're doing and how they react to what's going on around them (although the two main men on the 'good' side of the GGP story are reserved and shadowy enough to be hard to like, with there always being some doubt about just how much they have Rin's best interests at heart), and the general situation is believable - it's really very easy to start watching the series, get caught up in the characters, and then... oh! It's over already!
Which is one of two main problems that the series has: it tried to cover a lot of ground, and 12 episodes ultimately proves far to short to cram it all into, with some fairly important plot threads being left unresolved as a result. Rin's brother is left languishing in jail, his murder charges unresolved; the plot resolution relies in a large way on evidence of corruption uncovered by a dedicated reporter, but rather than cover what she does in detail, she goes away to Arizona one episode and returns a few later with the evidence in hand - no coverage of what went on between. There are other similar examples, too, where things simply happen too quickly, and would have made more sense or been more believable if there'd been time to develop events more thoroughly.
The second fault is a nagging feeling that something's not quite right about the setting - it takes a certain suspension of disbelief to buy a small paramilitary group rising to control the world; when the turning point of that campaign was apparently a (failed) raid that those involved have done their damnedest to keep secret, it gets even less believable. The Ridebacks themselves are a neat idea, but seem impractical to me: it's a bit like the "uncanny valley", where the human mind will buy into 2D animation that's far removed from reality, but has trouble accepting some 3D representations that are too close to being "real" - the Ridebacks are familiar technology, they're presented as logical developments of motorcycles, but the enhancements dump them straight in the uncanny valley of technology. I'll admit that may just be me, though - your mileage may vary.
Neither failing is big enough to outdo the show's strong points. I'm always a bit wary of putting on shows I know nothing about - I like to have at least a hint of what I'm going to get, and Rideback had slipped in far enough below the radar that I really didn't know what was coming. That made it the most pleasant surprise of the year, as once I started I genuinely couldn't stop - I blitzed through it in no time, and finished wanting more (and with enough loose ends that I knew there could have been more). An easy recommendation.
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