Nearly all of the reviews of this film here are what I like to call "Fanboy Reviews", which are overly reverent, uncritical, and make no attempt to really give a fair assessment of a film. All these types of reviews do is praise everything about the film.
So let me give you a real film review, using actual standard criteria that other films are judged by.
Space Battleship Yamato is a typical Japanese Science Fiction Film. It's uneven, awful in parts, and interesting in others, with terrible acting, bad storytelling, and "Duh" moments. Japanese science fiction need not be awful. After all, there are plenty of awesome Japanese actors, Dramas, comedies, samurai films, and action movies that made film history. When it comes to SciFi films, Japanese studios have traditionally treated the genre as children's material. The most ambitious Japanese Scifi film was 1990's Solar Crisis, which boasted Charlton Heston, top notch effects, and a mostly American production crew. Unfortunately, because it was written and produced by a Japanese corporation, it sort of fell apart, and is now kind of a joke.
Space Battleship Yamato is no different. Like most Japanese attempts at live action Science Fiction movies, The film is loaded to the brim with over-the-top acting. Imagine a movie with William Shatner, a man famous for over-acting his parts. Now imagine that the whole cast is made of Shatners, all trying to out-act each other. This is what it's like to watch Space Battleship Yamato. Every reaction is an over reaction. If someone is startled, they flail about. Every time they blow up an enemy ship, everyone jumps out of their seats and high-fives each other. When Yuki and Kodai fall in love, it's like a couple of crazed people taking a running start, and crashing into each other. When a character is sad, it's crocodile tears and histrionics. This is rather typical of a lot of Japanese films; even many great Samurai films, including Kurosawa's, are full of hammy acting and over-the-top performances. It may be acceptable for Japanese film goers, but to western audiences, it just looks silly. No offense to Kurosawa.
The special effects are just sort of adequate. They obviously look like CGI, from nearly a decade before. I don't expect every new Scifi film that comes out to have the level of effects as say, a Star Wars film, or District 9, or Avatar, but too much of this movie suffers from the look of quickly done CGI, and for a 2010 film, that's just not good enough. When we see the alien Gamillas for the first time, it is obviously a CGI character, and moves like one. Thankfully, it's not the wretched CGI of the "CGI Monster of the week" films that we see from the Scifi Network, but it's still not the level of effects that we should see from a fully modern movie. Every lighting source has lens flares. Every highlight is too bright, Every movement is too fast and too jittery.
Then there's the story. The original animated story from 1977 was fine. We had earth attacked by some Nazi-like blue-skinned aliens with awesome military technology. Their leader, Dessler, was evil, but charming, and had lots of fun lines, and a sense of humor. The spacecraft of the Gamillas fleet, were interesting, well conceived, and iconic. For no apparent reason, they turned the Gamillas into weird insectoid creatures with a hive mind, and used none of the cool spacecraft from the original series. They made no attempt to highlight one of the series's major themes -- invoking naval warfare for space combat, and using tactics to defeat a superior force. The original series had lots of moments of Captain Okita making counter-intuitive moves in the heat of battle that ended up confusing the Gamillas, resulting in victory. Here, the filmmakers reduced the Gamillas to an army of identical cgi aliens, with cgi ships that don't do much of anything other than sit there silently and get blown up, Sure -- they had 90 minutes to tell a story that took 26 half-hour episodes to tell, but rather than condense it to the most significant parts of the story, they decided to make major revisions that just added nothing, or which subtracted too much.
Several characters become composites. Yuki is turned into an ace fighter pilot, rather than the vulnerable nurse/radar operator from the series. The character comes off as uneven -- one minute she's tougher than nails, telling Kodai to just take the loss of his brother like a man, then next minute, she's bawling her brains out over sacrificing a few crew members to save the rest of the ship. It just comes off as phony, unless Yuki is supposed to be a schizo. Captain Okita is so wooden, I'm surprised we didn't see him trailing sawdust behind him. He just has that sort of Samurai-movie lock-jawed face, where no emotions are visible, and he mumbles all of his lines like John Bellushi's Samurai character. Even his animated series counterpart showed more range.
All of this adds up to a wretched movie experience, where something with such potential is altered into something that is just a steaming pile of B-movie.
It should surprise some that I'm a huge fan of the Animated series, as well as the new Yamato: 2199 series. I was excited to hear that this movie was being made, but after seeing it, I was just very disappointed that it ended up being a lot more like the Wing Commander (1999) movie, than the average Star Trek movie, in terms of overall quality. I am still asking myself, after a lifetime watching Japanese films, why can't they make a decent science fiction movie?
So let me give you a real film review, using actual standard criteria that other films are judged by.
Space Battleship Yamato is a typical Japanese Science Fiction Film. It's uneven, awful in parts, and interesting in others, with terrible acting, bad storytelling, and "Duh" moments. Japanese science fiction need not be awful. After all, there are plenty of awesome Japanese actors, Dramas, comedies, samurai films, and action movies that made film history. When it comes to SciFi films, Japanese studios have traditionally treated the genre as children's material. The most ambitious Japanese Scifi film was 1990's Solar Crisis, which boasted Charlton Heston, top notch effects, and a mostly American production crew. Unfortunately, because it was written and produced by a Japanese corporation, it sort of fell apart, and is now kind of a joke.
Space Battleship Yamato is no different. Like most Japanese attempts at live action Science Fiction movies, The film is loaded to the brim with over-the-top acting. Imagine a movie with William Shatner, a man famous for over-acting his parts. Now imagine that the whole cast is made of Shatners, all trying to out-act each other. This is what it's like to watch Space Battleship Yamato. Every reaction is an over reaction. If someone is startled, they flail about. Every time they blow up an enemy ship, everyone jumps out of their seats and high-fives each other. When Yuki and Kodai fall in love, it's like a couple of crazed people taking a running start, and crashing into each other. When a character is sad, it's crocodile tears and histrionics. This is rather typical of a lot of Japanese films; even many great Samurai films, including Kurosawa's, are full of hammy acting and over-the-top performances. It may be acceptable for Japanese film goers, but to western audiences, it just looks silly. No offense to Kurosawa.
The special effects are just sort of adequate. They obviously look like CGI, from nearly a decade before. I don't expect every new Scifi film that comes out to have the level of effects as say, a Star Wars film, or District 9, or Avatar, but too much of this movie suffers from the look of quickly done CGI, and for a 2010 film, that's just not good enough. When we see the alien Gamillas for the first time, it is obviously a CGI character, and moves like one. Thankfully, it's not the wretched CGI of the "CGI Monster of the week" films that we see from the Scifi Network, but it's still not the level of effects that we should see from a fully modern movie. Every lighting source has lens flares. Every highlight is too bright, Every movement is too fast and too jittery.
Then there's the story. The original animated story from 1977 was fine. We had earth attacked by some Nazi-like blue-skinned aliens with awesome military technology. Their leader, Dessler, was evil, but charming, and had lots of fun lines, and a sense of humor. The spacecraft of the Gamillas fleet, were interesting, well conceived, and iconic. For no apparent reason, they turned the Gamillas into weird insectoid creatures with a hive mind, and used none of the cool spacecraft from the original series. They made no attempt to highlight one of the series's major themes -- invoking naval warfare for space combat, and using tactics to defeat a superior force. The original series had lots of moments of Captain Okita making counter-intuitive moves in the heat of battle that ended up confusing the Gamillas, resulting in victory. Here, the filmmakers reduced the Gamillas to an army of identical cgi aliens, with cgi ships that don't do much of anything other than sit there silently and get blown up, Sure -- they had 90 minutes to tell a story that took 26 half-hour episodes to tell, but rather than condense it to the most significant parts of the story, they decided to make major revisions that just added nothing, or which subtracted too much.
Several characters become composites. Yuki is turned into an ace fighter pilot, rather than the vulnerable nurse/radar operator from the series. The character comes off as uneven -- one minute she's tougher than nails, telling Kodai to just take the loss of his brother like a man, then next minute, she's bawling her brains out over sacrificing a few crew members to save the rest of the ship. It just comes off as phony, unless Yuki is supposed to be a schizo. Captain Okita is so wooden, I'm surprised we didn't see him trailing sawdust behind him. He just has that sort of Samurai-movie lock-jawed face, where no emotions are visible, and he mumbles all of his lines like John Bellushi's Samurai character. Even his animated series counterpart showed more range.
All of this adds up to a wretched movie experience, where something with such potential is altered into something that is just a steaming pile of B-movie.
It should surprise some that I'm a huge fan of the Animated series, as well as the new Yamato: 2199 series. I was excited to hear that this movie was being made, but after seeing it, I was just very disappointed that it ended up being a lot more like the Wing Commander (1999) movie, than the average Star Trek movie, in terms of overall quality. I am still asking myself, after a lifetime watching Japanese films, why can't they make a decent science fiction movie?
Tell Your Friends