天下制覇

I’m scared. Hold me.

This is part of a television ‘series’ remake of the original being released as ‘films.’ Before I run out of quote marks, it basically just means that they’re releasing them completely haphazardly and grouping what they call episodes into longer chunks as sort of standalone movies. I have no idea when it’s supposed to continue or even where the second ‘episode’ of this ‘film’ is.

Impressions:

I haven’t watched the original Yamato. I don’t really like thinking about shows from the Beforetimes when I had not emerged from my chrysalis to survey the world. But hoo boy, does this give you the feeling of being back in the 70s. A heady time where thrilling space battles meant lasers that lazily spurt out of giant canons with Star Trek sounds and evasive maneuvers were listlessly drifting to the left. And the ships themselves… hoo boy. Star Trek has nothing on these beauties. The original 1960s Star Trek. I think they used a Sega Saturn to render them. Basically what I’m saying is that it is not a show that looks like it was made in 2012. It is not a show that looks like it was made in 1992 either.

Leaving its production woes aside, this was basically a prequel episode featuring the failed final fight before the Earth was nuked to oblivion. Most of the first half was the lazy space battle and most of the second was split between exposition about the outcome of said battle and the usual Japanese flair for characterization, featuring such subtle clues as "He’s the ace pilot!" Of course, continuing in the 1970s motif, the characters all overact like ninnies. My favorite part was when the Yukikaze went off to sacrifice itself to cover Beardy’s escape. Since they were doomed, they all began singing as is the Klingon tradition, and then were blown up in about 10 seconds after firing only a couple shots. I’m a little bit at a loss as to how they delayed anything. Maybe if they had spent more effort on fighting instead of singing, they could’ve survived 15 seconds. And at the end, Unicef the UNCF showed how it’s the best military ever when the two main characters hijacked a weaponless plane and flew off. That led to my second favorite moment of the episode, when the giant display started blinking "SYSTEM ERROR!" and the characters looked at it, gasped, and then yelled "System error!" Now that’s what we call synergy. Or painful redundancy.

Oh yeah, there was also some mysterious girl in a mysterious pod with a mysterious blinking device. This is a retro Japanese space show after all. You can’t not have that.