I don't know if the version of this DVD that I am reviewing is different from that of other reviewers. It is entitled "She, The Ultimate Weapon" hails from Bonzai Media Corp & has a running time of 90 minutes rather than 2 hours mentioned by others. It certainly stars Aki Maeda, easily recognisable as the insufferable goody two-shoes of Battle Royale 1 & 2. The film is very disappointing. I watched the anime some time ago (& was surprisingly impressed) so I know what is SUPPOSED to be going on, but it is put across very crudely & simplistically here. The script is poor with Chise spending most of her time bleating "Shu-chan" & Shuji bleating "Chise" in return, or there's some boffin character unconvincingly explaining what's supposed to be going on. Clearly nothing much was spent on special effects which varied from poor to rubbish. Continuity is bad & editing so badly ill-judged that with nearly every scene-change I kept thinking "What the hell happened there?" or "What did I just miss?". Perhaps the 30 minutes apparently missing from my DVD's running time accounts for this butchering (I wouldn't dignify it with the term "editing"). But above ALL other faults was the English sub-titling. It was atrocious - absolutely flipping ATROCIOUS. This is (or should have been) a moving story - of how war de-humanises & how love can overcome all adversities in a time of war. Decent sub-titling could have overcome the film's many shortcomings (which other reviewers have already detailed)to convey this message to the viewer - but it failed miserably to the point of derision. Whoever did the sub-titling deserves to be sacked, as does the person responsible for letting it be released like this. The anime of this was contained in 13 episodes of around 25 minutes each, or about 5 hours running time. I appreciate the problems the studio had of condensing this into 2 hours (or 90 minutes in the case of my DVD) but they should have thought of that before they started & commissioned sufficient expertise & resources to do justice to the source material. Some people have put the question of who was this war with. Well it's never spelt out but the aircraft bombing the hell out of Hokkaido are Soviet Union/Russian Tupolev Tu 160 long range strategic bombers - so make your own mind up.
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