atrahasis1 Reviews

Space Battleship Yamato (2010)

Excellent live-action with high romance and sacrifice

[10/10 · 14 July 2011]

I have seen every Space Battleship Yamato episode and movie, have been a long-time fan of this series since the 1970's, know the words to the theme songs in English as well as Japanese, have all of the model kits of all of the major ships, and have had crew as well as captain's uniforms tailor-made for myself. So as a serious fan I give my total approval for this film. It is just so wonderful I don't know where to begin.

Wonderful casting! Kimura looks the part and fleshed out the Kodai character into real life very effectively. I was so glad that his hair was not a recreation of the odd side-covering bangs of the animated character, because that would've just looked stupid. Instead, his hair was long and wavy and very J-pop style.

Wonderful job on wardrobe! The leather jackets really worked for me because they look like what real flight jackets should look like, as opposed to the white shirts they wore in the original anime. There was a great variety of footwear among the crew, from shoes to boots to steampunk-ish numbers to what looked like hiking boots (Kodai). My only complaint is that Kodai probably would have looked better with the same calf-length boots that some of the other crew were wearing, however uncomfy they are to wear. Wonderful space helmets as well, quite an upgrade from the 1970's ones which never really made much sense to me.

The guns: Wonderful job on the rifles, but I would have liked to have seen the Astro Automatic (Cosmo Nambu), which is the trademark Matsumoto gun! The ones in this film looked little more than dressed-up Glocks or HK's (I'd say Walthers as well, but Walthers actually look better than these guns did).

Wonderful live-action recreations of the most poignant scenes from the entire animated series! There is high romance and sacrifice. My only real complaint was there was not enough tenderness between Kodai and Yuki, but that may actually have slowed the pacing down too much.

Wonderful idea to cast some of the crew as female characters, especially Dr. Sado! And she acted like the original male character too, especially in the brig scene where she is visiting Kodai.

The effects...oh my god, the effects...were just unbelievably amazing! The design of the Earth ships in the beginning were the most impressive (after the Yamato of course) and totally exceeded my expectations for starship design in the Matsumoto universe. Okita's flasghip in fact may have been an homage to the real-life Bismarck because the gun arrangement was very similar to that famous German battleship's. Either that or the Japanese Kongo-class battleship which also had a similar arrangement, but the blockiness of the turrets seemed more similar to the Bismarck's! The fighters...omg the fighters...so unbelievably sexy and well thought out! They resemble the original Black Tigers and Cosmo Zero but with stealthy features and thrusters reminiscent of the F-22 Raptor, and swept-forward wings like the Su-47 Berkut! Combining design elements like that in such a thoughtful and logical manner really show that the design team knew their stuff. I was also glad that there seemed to be a much-reduced fighter complement on board (seemed like a dozen fighters or less) which is MUCH more believable than the 70 or so that the anime version carried...which is just impossible for a ship only 263 m long with most of the internal space being its space engine!

And the way the shock turrets destroyed mass numbers of the enemy...brilliant and logical!!! In the original anime you had the shock turrets sometimes destroying mass numbers of targets just by passing them and not hitting them directly, which did not make a lot of sense! Obviously the original idea was that they could be used as an area weapon, but they were never able to show this convincingly in the anime, but they took time to think it through for this movie and made the appropriate effects.

And as for the wave motion cannon (undulation gun)...so cool! My only complaint is perhaps they shouldn't have used it to take the shot at the planet-bomber at the very beginning, because using that gun was always a big climactic moment in the anime. The plain old shock turrets would have taken that thing out without a problem. Then again...can we really get too much of the wave cannon? :)

All in all, a super wonderful production!

Starship Exeter: The Tressaurian Intersection (2005 Video)

This is an insult to the art and spirit of Star Trek

[3/10 · 8 June 2011]

This episode is such an insult to Star Trek because Gene Roddenberry would NEVER have allowed women to be portrayed in such a degrading manner. The blonde commander's skirt is so short that her panties are visible in the rear when she is simply standing there, which means her uniform was not properly made to fit her. At best this was a mistake, but at worst this was blatant and deliberate exposure, and no woman in any military organization...especially one who is in a command position...would knowingly allow herself to be exposed like that. Yes, there were times in TOS when skirts went up and we saw the panties, but that was usually during an attack and when people were getting thrown around the room. Otherwise, women in TOS were allowed to retain their human dignity by wearing skirts that at least covered their panties while in an upright position. I'd really like to think this fubar was an accident, but at some point during production somebody would have noticed, and when they did they did not deem the matter important enough to fix. The poor blonde woman was obviously being sexually exploited because she changes in and out of her skirt and into pants so many times throughout the episode. Instead of keeping her pants (and her dignity) on, she inexplicably changes back into the skirt again and again.

Was this distracting enough to detract from the story? Yes. Uniforms that did not fit properly, unnecessary sexual exploitation and humiliation of a woman...Gene would have been appalled, and I am personally shocked.

Star Trek: Nemesis (2002)

The worst story ever, thank God for the special effects

[6/10 · 14 December 2002]

Spoilers The story is quite good for the first 5 minutes of the movie when the Romulan Senate gets assassinated, but when we shift to Picard giving a toast at Riker and Troi's reception, it all begins to fall apart. This scene has Picard doing a monologue that seems way too long and that really should have been cut shorter to keep a quick pace in the movie, something which the director, Stuart Baird, seems to be really bad at. This film should have aimed to be a great action film like its predecesor "First Contact" or its contemporaries "Star Wars Episode II", "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets", and "Lord of the Rings, the Two Towers", but the slow pacing and weak story makes this quite impossible, and so this movie falls very short of being in the same league as these other films.

Yes, the story is weak and leaves us stupefied about many details. They do not go into explaining the origins of the Data clone they find on that planet and who the scavengers are, we are just supposed to accept like unthinking animals that there just happened to be another Data that Doctor Soongh created way back when (not Lore) and which the Romulans found and placed on that barren rock for the Enterprise to find. That still does not explain how and why those scavenger people have it, and why the Data clone was in pieces. Later in the film the Romulan Commander Donatra, who originally assassinated the Romulan Senate because she wanted the military to destroy Earth once and for all, does a complete about-face in her political views and decides to STOP the new Praetor Shinzon whom she helped put into power, and her reason for this is because she does not want to see Earth destroyed and this leaving a bad legacy on the Romulan people. Um, shouldn't she have thought of that BEFORE she decided to help install Shinzon as the new Praetor and cold-bloodedly murdering the entire Romulan Senate at the beginning of the movie...for the sole sake of destroying Earth? Her sudden "conversion" is both psychologically unrealistic and quite unbelievable, and definitely contrived. If the writers wanted some Romulan starships to be helping out the Enterprise in the final battle against Shinzon (as Donatra ended up doing), it would have been far better to have somehow killed off Donatra in the middle of the movie and the Romulan ships that help the Enterprise in the end to have been other Romulan forces who had a gripe against Shinzon right from the beginning. That would have been more believable psychologically speaking. If Donatra had her own agenda to become the next Praetor if Shinzon were out of the way and suddenly saw the destruction of Earth as unecessary, this should have been explained in th e movie! Instead we are left puzzled as to Donatra's sudden "conversion". This is a big reason why the story is weak. A good story should explain all of the intrigue and deception as best it can to keep the audience interested and informed, otherwise we are left befuddled and sitting there just watching the pretty special effects.

The movie drags on in a boring pace until the starship battle sequence in the end, which we get to see the Enterpise fighting for its life with all guns blazing. The fact is though, this battle falls short of being "Wrath of Khan" quality or even "Undiscovered Country" quality because for the most part we see just "pockmarking" on the hulls which gives the impression that everybody is using really weak weapons. There is one scene when one of the Romulan Valdore-class ships loses a wing, but there are no other hull-penetrating weapons shots of the type we saw in Star Treks II and VI. Just pockmarking. And more pockmarking. It gets really sad to see after a while, because you know these ships should have really powerful weapons but they can't seem to do more than scratch each other's hulls if that. There definitely should have been more pieces and panels blowing off.

Lastly, I think they should have let Jonathan Frakes direct this one because he did a great job on "First Contact", but instead they gave it to Stuart Baird who totally messed things up. Weak writing, weak directing, weak battle scenes...there is very little that this movie has going for it other than the interesting fact that the new Enterprise seems to have four extra phaser banks and aft photon torpedoes that fire from behind the saucer, details that techies might enjoy.