"Space Battleship Yamato" Takes Aim but Misses Its Mark

Details

Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Thursday, 12 September 2013 18:11

Written by Renzo Adler

Based on the hit 1979 Japanese animated series of the same name, Space Battleship Yamato, distributed by Eleven Arts, tries to ramp up the flash and glitz, but rather than paying tribute to its source material, it just gives lip service. First, a little context; Yamato was a phenomenon in its native Japan and is attributed to taking anime to new heights in scale and through its serious tone. While Yamato is fairly obscure in the West, it is one of the cornerstones of Japanese science-fiction. Yamato is often compared to Star Trek, but it’s narrative was more grounded in re-writing WWII in space than seeking out strange new worlds.

In the distant future, Earth has become a wasteland due to a radioactive bombardment by aliens from the planet Gamilas (in the original show they were blue skinned people with blond hair, but the movie makes them less humanoid). Earth receives information about a device on a distant planet called Iskandar that can rid our home of radiation, so our heroes dredge up the Japanese battleship Yamato (for you history buffs, it was Japan’s largest battleship in WWII and was sunk near Okinawa in 1945), slap a warp-engine onto it, and head off into space with a rag-tag crew of survivors and their stoic captain.

The movie awkwardly tries to marry the aesthetic of an animated series from the late 70’s, with the grungy look of science fiction today. The fiery Susumu Kodai (played by Takuya Kimura, formerly of the boy band SMAP) sports a bouffant ripped from the original series, while everyone else more or less wears their hair like a sane person from this decade, and the crew members wear tough looking bomber-jacket outfits adorned with bright, primary colored arrows.

If I had to sum up the problems of this film with a single word, it would be “rushed.” The original Yamato series, like Star Trek, was told over many episodes and sequel movies, thus giving the audience time to get to know the cast, whereas this film basically says “HEYHEREARETHECHARACTERSFROMTHESHOWHERE’STHEIRPERSONALTIESCOMEONWEGOTTAGO!” Instead of us getting a movie that's one chapter in the long voyage of the Yamato, we have to get through the whole journey in about two hours, while the characters are just quickly slotted into categories like “the hot head”, the “dumb but loveable brawler”, and “the love interest”.

The Yamato ship itself still looks fantastic and has this caviler feel to it while also being totally badass, like if you mashed together the Millennium Falcon and a Star Destroyer, but this is one of the rare instances where the visuals really shine since the film is bogged down by CGI effects that might have been impressive on a PS2 game, and the sets are bland square boxes that think darkened lighting is a substitute for actual grit and texture. This is a real shame, because the original series was drawn by Leiji Matsumoto, one of Japan’s greatest comic authors, yet the film lacks his distinct visual operatic charm.

The film is laden with superficial platitudes about sacrifice, and even though the crew is on a journey to save earth, they’re very much a Japanese crew, with a Japanese vessel, and they want to save Japan from foreign invaders with atomic weapons. While I did not grow up with the original Space Battleship Yamato (or Star Blazers, as it was called in the States), I get the feeling that even if I was familiar with these characters on a more intimate level, this film would still feel like a cash-in rather than a tribute.

Oh, and the end credits theme is performed by Steven Tyler, for some reason. Because when I think of anime classics, I'm supposed to think of Armageddon?

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