I Watch Films: Harlock: Space Pirate

 

Harlock: Space Pirate

It turns out that space is hard to live in, both spiritually and physically, plants growing badly. When the billions of colonists tried to come home to Earth wars broke out; the Gaia Sanction won and declared Earth off-limits, to be an inspiration for humanity. On a distant colony the Arcadia, the giant unique dark matter powered ship of notorious space pirate Captain Harlock, arrives. It’s been out there fighting the Gaia Sanction for a century. Spacers try to join the crew; one of them, Logan, succeeds.

On board he finds that Harlock is a doomed gothic immortal with a crew of misfits, including the elf-like alien Mimay, the last of her kind, who has the secret of dark matter. Harlock is looking for 100 warheads which he will place at certain locations which will reset the timestream into a better one. It’s revealed that Logan is working for his brother Ezra, the wheelchair-using (hoverchair-using?) admiral of Gaia Fleet. Going down to a planet to set a warhead Logan sacrifices himself for Kei (the female crew member), then Harlock rescues him.

The last warhead is somewhere in the solar system so they head there. There’s a lot of nonsense with illusions of ships and fleets and superweapons. Eventually the Arcadia rams and boards Ezra’s flagship and Ezra explains that the warheads won’t reset the timestream, they’ll destroy the universe and start another one from scratch. Logan changes sides a couple of times and the crew are taken prisoner.

The backstory is explained in a disjointed way. Firstly the Gaia Sanction, after they won the war, built four dark matter battleships with the last four aliens in order to defend the Earth. Then they took to visiting Earth themselves while banning everyone else. Enraged, Harlock rebelled, intending to encase the Earth in a dark matter force field but this went wrong, wrecking the Earth, which has since been cloaked in an illusion.

Secondly Logan and Ezra grew up with Nami, who has been appearing giving advice to both Logan and Ezra but is now revealed to be a hologram and her body is in a life support tube. She had been working on growing plants on Mars, or possibly on a space station (not clear?), but Logan caused the accident that injured both she and Ezra. When Ezra confronts her about her helping Logan she realises that Ezra is consumed by guilt and anger about her situation and goads him into killing her.

This then moves into the final sequence, Logan changing sides one more time, events conspiring to reveal the truth, offer hope, bring down the Gaia Sanction and free the Arcadia to fight tyranny out in the spacelanes. And if that doesn’t work? The 100 warheads are out there to reset the universe if needed.

This is a CGI anime film based on a manga, one that feels as though they wanted to cram in every cool bit from that manga. Every scene adds a complexity, while revealing a cool thing. The characters can’t quite hold up under this, and even less so under the mythic weight they are required to hold. The second superweapon in half an hour (which has mostly been ship battles cutting occasionally to political plotting and backstory) seems a bit much, and the reveal of ever more possibilities of the dark matter powered Arcadia raises questions such as, why didn’t they try this the first time? It’s not a film that bears over-thinking (why is there a weird, soot-black long necked bird? Why is the comic-relief bosun so relentlessly unfunny?) It does look pretty cool.

Watch This: Exciting space-battle heavy science fiction cartoon
Don’t Watch This: Layer on layer of complexity as floppy haired anime characters bemoan their tragedies