The poster for Summer Wars had the tagline "connection itself is our weapon." This sentiment is not exactly hard to come by. It could be the tagline for Yu-Gi-Oh!, Pokémon, One Piece, Shaman King, Mob Psycho 100, Dandadan, Gachiakuta, and of course Digimon. Summer Wars has more in common with these than Our War Game and Belle, the two films that are supposed to be the same as Summer Wars.
The more emotional scenes in all those series are similar to those in Summer Wars: dramatic, spectacular, maybe a little sappy. The editing becomes snappy as Sakae calls everyone in town and encourages them to help mitigate the crisis. In voiceover, she explains the joy she felt at her first meeting with Wabisuke, offering him the home he never had. The music swells as Natsuki defeats the hostile AI, powered by messages from people asking her to "save our precious families."
Summer Wars does not really examine the idea that "connection itself is our weapon," but it certainly believes it, and wants you to believe it too. Also, "connection" here has little to do with the internet. The reason Summer Wars is so different from Our War Game and Belle is that those films actually are about the internet.
Our War Game features the Y2K bug as a villain, incarnated as a Digimon. It cuts between scenes all over the world to show the simultaneity of events over great distance, something made relevant by the internet. It depicts the ordinary household computers of the late 1990s and early 2000s. The characters exploit technology: at the climax of the film, they essentially invent the DDOS attack as a weapon against the villain.
Belle, on the other hand, is more focused on the social effects of online life. It generates drama from false identities, cruel rumors, and engagement with online affinity groups and cultural objects. The story's thematic core is whether the main character's online life is "real" enough to matter.
Such things don't happen in Summer Wars. It does depict simultaneity like Our War Game does, but not between people all over the world. It sticks to the various members of the Jinnouchi family. Characters briefly talk about technology and online life, but we don't really see any remotely realistic or illuminating portrayals of such things. The actual depictions of technology in the film are, frankly, ludicrous. It's simply not the focus of the movie.
It's true Summer Wars essentially copies the broad strokes of Our War Game's script, its pop-art depiction of cyberspace, and even its trick of using red outlines to "soften" objects that exist in cyberspace. But it actually resembles Hosoda's later Studio Chizu films more. I'm talking about Wolf Children, The Boy and the Beast, and Mirai. The focus of these films is the importance of family. And family, for Hosoda, is not a social institution. It's unconditional love, selflessness, and togetherness. Connection itself is our weapon--the connection between a single mother and her two children, the connection between a father and adoptive son, the connection between generations going back a hundred years.
This is all fine, even if in Mirai it starts to feel a little weird. (Am I supposed to believe this barely verbal child comprehends what is happening around him?) But it makes these films all feel simpler, more pat, less mysterious than Hosoda's earlier work. One Piece: Baron Omatsuri and the Secret Island is a bizarrely dark take on its source material. Hosoda's TV episodes in Digimon Adventure and Ojamajo Doremi are much more somber than any of his films, and are probably the best work he's done.
I can't deny that something about Summer Wars is hard to resist. I do like Gachiakuta, and a big part of that is its execution of the formula.
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