I don't have strong opinions about Waco, but that gave me the heebie-jeebies -- these guys just helped wipe out a hundred-plus people, and now we're supposed to just move on and accept them as the good guys because the wackos were, well, obviously wackos, and were holding an innocent prisoner. Now we're supposed to accept it and get absorbed in the story to free the angel from her subsequent imprisonment by the goverment.
Here's where we're not on the same page, because I don't see an implication that the raid is being weighted as morally good, or the perpetrators of it as the good guys. I'm seeing it as, this angel-person is being exploited by the government in the same way she was exploited by the wackos, and after the raid these two individuals come around to realizing it and their own complicity in it. So they try to make amends, to make a stand against what they've until now been a part of. I can see arguing that it's not really possible to make things right with this one action, but again I don't really see that as what Miyazaki is trying to say.
As to the raid, I assumed the gas was non-lethal, and it's not really that clear to me what's happening in the highway explosion--there are two versions of the chase, and I don't think anyone is killed in the second. I could be wrong.
Sure, faceless, disposable bad guys = too easy. But this also seems to me to be part of the contrast Miyazaki is drawing; impersonality, disregard of individual value vs. a conversion, a focus on faces not uniforms, on individual action not following orders. YMMV.
no subject
Here's where we're not on the same page, because I don't see an implication that the raid is being weighted as morally good, or the perpetrators of it as the good guys. I'm seeing it as, this angel-person is being exploited by the government in the same way she was exploited by the wackos, and after the raid these two individuals come around to realizing it and their own complicity in it. So they try to make amends, to make a stand against what they've until now been a part of. I can see arguing that it's not really possible to make things right with this one action, but again I don't really see that as what Miyazaki is trying to say.
As to the raid, I assumed the gas was non-lethal, and it's not really that clear to me what's happening in the highway explosion--there are two versions of the chase, and I don't think anyone is killed in the second. I could be wrong.
Sure, faceless, disposable bad guys = too easy. But this also seems to me to be part of the contrast Miyazaki is drawing; impersonality, disregard of individual value vs. a conversion, a focus on faces not uniforms, on individual action not following orders. YMMV.