Assault Girls: The Bigger Picture

Along with a groovy new poster comes some fascinating news about Mamoru Oshii’s latest film, Assault Girls — last discussed here upon the recent release of a fantastic trailer. Twitch has provided a more detailed synopsis that increases my already-high levels of anticipation regarding this film — a scifi adventure about sexy girls with guns vs giant sand-serpents — by revealing that the story takes place in the same artistic environment as Oshii’s previous live-action opus, the superb VR scifi drama Avalon.

New Synopsis:

The story takes place in an in-game virtual space called “Avalon (f)”, a barren desert-like battlefield, resembling a devastated world after a nuclear war. “Avalon (f)” is a world full of gigantic monsters. It is a fictional world where an endless “hunt”, known as “play”, repeatedly takes place. The drama centers around a sniper who pilots a camouflage fighter plane; a sorcerer who can freely transform herself; a woman fighter equipped with an assault rifle on a horseback; and a large-framed man equipped with an anti-tank rifle. There is also the “Game Master” who watches the players from the air.

In a world where giant Sunakujira (Sand Whales) monsters crawl the earth, storming battleships fly high up in the sky, and assault rifle muzzle flashes go off everywhere, can anyone shoot down the mutant monster, Madara Sunakujira (Spotted Sand Whale)? If so, who?!

So the narrative takes place in an in-game virtual space named “Avalon (f)”? This makes sense of some of the images included in the trailer — the serpent that pixelates into oblivion when killed, the blurry air of surrealism, the floating sphere, the non-naturalistic movement — and is something we might have guessed given the initial music that plays, resembling as it does the brilliant musical soundtrack of Avalon.

I find this connection an extremely felicitous one as Avalon is one of the more intelligent and interesting science fiction films to come out over the past decade. Hopefully Assault Girls will follow in its footsteps.

• Source: Twitch via Avery