This past weekend, I went to yet another geeky convention down in Baltimore. It was sort of a pre-game to Otakon, a small affair that was mostly meant as a way to meet new people. There was a variety of cool stuff to do, including Brawl+, BlazBlue Continuum Shift, Magic: The Gathering Cube Drafting, and two rooms dedicated to movies and anime. Now, there was a plan here that originally involved setting up a screening of Kick-Ass, but the best laid plans of mice and men are shot in the chest by Nicolas Cage, so that didn’t pan out. Instead, we got a full screening of Summer Wars, an anime movie that you probably haven’t seen, and really, really should.

The premise is pretty weird to say the least. A young math wiz, Kenji Koiso, is paid to pretend to be the boyfriend of the hottest girl in school, Natsuki Shinohara. Why? Well this particular girl is the daughter of a very influential family, a family who has its hands in basically every aspect of Japanese life. Now, you and I both know family can be pretty damn critical, so she makes up a long and complicated lie to impress her family at her grandmother’s 90th birthday celebration. Unfortunately the lie is seen through, and drama ensues. Uh-oh!

Now, before you stop reading this review thinking this is some sort of chick flick, bear with me. While everyone is having happy and awkward family fun time, a computer service, called OZ is hacked, and hacked good. OZ is basically a fusion of Second Life, Facebook, and Skynet, and is linked to all the important computer systems of the world. The culprit is Love Machine, an artificial intelligence that was actually created by Wabisuke Jinnouchi, the uncle and first crush of our sexy female protagonist. Love machine starts stealing people’s accounts and linking them together into one gigantic hive-mind processor. It then uses its newfound power to screw up the real world by turning off power, water, emergency supplies, and eventually diverting a space satellite out of orbit and on a crash course with a nuclear power plant. So yeah, it wants to destroy the world.

Luckily, the strongest fighter in the digital world of OZ is Kazuma Ikezawa, and even more luckily, he happens to be a part of this big-ass extended family. Unluckily, however, he loses to Love Machine several times over the course of the movie. While he, Kenji, and about half of the family worry about how to stop Love Machine, the other half of the family continues to plan for the birthday celebration and deal with the chaos that has erupted all over the world. Then our kindly old grandma dies … oops.

So, of course, half of the family is diverted to planning her funeral, while the rest of the family secures a giant server, powered by a commercial grade fishing ship generator, and cooled by blocks of pure ice. Their plan is to trap love machine in the server and disconnect it from the network. However, in the middle of their plan, other family members steal the ice from the server room to keep grandma’s body from rotting … oops again.

So now love machine escapes and is more powerful than ever. However, Natsuki, our hot heroine of the day, figures she can appeal to Love Machine’s love of games, and challenges him to a game of Koi-Koi (a Japanese card game) in an online casino. She fights in a prolonged battle with him, wagering user accounts, and just as she is about to lose, the whole of the internet donate their accounts to her, and she reduces Love Machine’s power to next to nothing! However, then Love Machine diverts the satellite to fall on the family house that our characters were all staying in … oops a third time.

So it falls down to Kenji our, math wiz protagonist to save the day. You see the password for the satellite is encrypted in a long mathematical code, and only a math savant like our hero can crack it. He gives it a go with a pencil and paper, but eventually he decides to do it all in his head, mathing so hard that his brain has an aneurism and blood leaks out of his nose. However, he succeeds, and our digital martial arts expert punches Love Machine so hard he shatters into a million pieces.

I didn’t make any of this up. Summer Wars is just this awesome. I really have nothing else to say about this wholly amazing anime movie, other than the fact that I am jealous I will never, ever, be able to math hard enough to save the world. Yes I am using math as a verb. Trust me, it makes sense in this context. That being said, watch Summer Wars. It’s amazing.

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