Madlax - Finished
S P O I L E R S !
Okay, finally finished watching Madlax today. I really chewed through a ton of eps yesterday, like from eps 10 to 20 or so, before I regained sanity and realized that I didn’t have ep 26!! And the way the series was going, with layer upon layer of mystery piled on and promises of huge reversals and revelations to smack your already defragged mind at the end, I think I would have died if I had to be left hanging.
But anyway, I managed after much digging to snag that coveted last ep, and watched ep 24 and 25 this morning (separated by a nap).
Um, okay, how should I say this… First of all, I really liked this series, up until ep 20 perhaps. After a slow start and much headscratching, it began to make sense, in a convoluted sort of way. It was original, and I liked the surreal direction style, even if there were a few (okay, make that quite a few) over the top elements. For example, one only takes so much of Madlax twirling around and shooting 20 soldiers with her eyes closed. All in all, though, the overall feel was of a good serious anime where the director wasn’t pandering to cheesecake. I like that - just cool anime of cool female characters. So aesthetically this show appealed to me.
However! The last 5 eps dragged. Big time. I started to get impatient, and honestly I thought it would have been great as 21 eps instead of 26. I already guessed the Big Truth way beforehand (it’s not like they weren’t giving us a ton of clues, from Madlax’s faint memory of her father to the angle of the shooting) and it was painful waiting and waiting for it to unfurl. Too much filler at the end, as if they had a story that they couldn’t tell in 13 eps but had to fight hard to stuff 26 eps with. That’s really too bad, because I thought the pacing in the first 18 or so was excellent. Dammit! See what happens when you get locked into a format!
However, even if you take that away, the ending had some pretty significant flaws. First, too much senseless death; I felt that they killed off characters just because they didn’t want to be too conventional and happy. Sometimes a character’s death serves to generate enough angst to power up the “finally get a spine and do something!” factor in a reluctant hero or heroine, but in this case… I dunno. I thought it was too plot devicey. Couldn’t the writers have come up with a better way to work out the ending? I understand that the final confrontation has to be concentrated on Margaret and Madlax and Reticia finding the truth and somehow sticking a wrench into Evil Villain’s plans, but hey, after all the wonderfully built up sense of mystery and subtlety before, this was like taking a sledgehammer to whack off the last inches on a sculpture that had been, until now, painstakingly carved out with a delicate chisel.
So, dropped the ball there. Next pet peeve, really stupid annoying final baddy. I’m sorry, the Friday Monday insanity thing got really old. Too cliche, too shallow, and a blatant disregard to good storytelling by using “because he’s psychotic” as an excuse not to come up with any explanations of motivations or background. Not to mention the age old plot device of villain using brainwashed main character to his nefarious ends. Sorry, I’ve seen too much anime to be satisfied with that.
Third, surrealism and warping of reality taken too far. Too many people getting shot many many times and not dying. I don’t know if the storywriters and director actually had the “physics” of the whole thing in their heads and just neglected to explain it properly, or if they just bent it all to their convenience. Madlax, yeah I could see and pick up right away. Friday Monday, his headquarters, the alternate reality of Margaret wandering around, eh…? Whatever.
Last, the resolution. Actually I have to say that I liked how Margaret made Reticia her sister. Or rather, I did not expect Margaret to split herself again, and that was good because Madlax deserves to be her own self. I was afraid that Margaret was going to do a Reset on the world, because that would have been natural given all the deaths and the power of her wish, and for me that would have been a terribly disappointing cop-out. Luckily that did not happen. Yet, it was still dissatisfying. Not because things didn’t wind up hunky dory or because people died and didn’t come back… just that I enjoyed the rest of it too much to live with an ending with a sorry ass of a villain.
But, in the end, I didn’t feel that Madlax was a waste of time at all. There was enough that I liked about it - the character ofMadlax, the unfurling of mystery (although to be honest it wasn’t that intellectual or sophisticated, but then again not everything needs to be), the high level of art and animation, and the music - that I can simply sigh and say sometimes you gotta accept that few anime can truly be considered masterpieces from start to finish. I think Madlax just aimed a little high and stumbled on the final execution.
