Review of The Wind Rises

Ugh, what a dull movie. Much like most biopics out there, this has nothing potent to it and all it has to offer is exactly what you'd expect every step of the way. A dream motivated by limitation, a career marked by ambition and at some point, a slight conflict. Looking back to your past work and feeling both proud and sorry. All emotional segments are undermined by the erratic pacing and characters lacking any depth whatsoever. Basically what The Wind Rises amounts to is Miyazaki being able to build a universal metaphor that can fit many places while indulging in his fetishes as muchas he can. However, if his intention was to evoke a genuine emotional reaction he better improve his dramatic writing to be efficient. For people to buy into your shit you need to be actually convincing, something Miyazaki has never been on a realistic level. He prefers to criticize Patlabor 2's cynicism cause to him it was contrived and manipulative, after all, that is just using reality as is to build your message around. However, by denying reality when tackling reality the result is exactly what happened here: artificiality. His idealization of a protagonist has no place in a narrative about a real person, his idealization of a relationship has no place in a real life romance, his idealization of Europe has no place in such dark periods of our history, and by distancing himself from that which actually is, he makes it impossible for me to take the whole thing seriously. It tries to be unconventional by the standards of Miyazaki only to be extremely conventional, fascinating really. And so, due to its lack of content and unwelcome fantasized approach, I hope his next project to be as far from "unconventional" as possible.