Note that this "special" is also listed as a movie, separately, with all the metadata you could want.
Bit of a let-down that we saw four battles in the first episode, and four battles in this one, but only short snippets of the remaining four (which still knocked out four bots that we never even really got to see in action). Why couldn't they just take three weeks for the qualifiers? For that matter, why did we only get to meet a fraction of the builders this time? Second episode is much weaker than the first, and hopefully the trend will reverse…
Lots of good action here, much more interesting fights than a lot of the qualifiers. Docked my episode rating by 2 because there was NO post-fight interview of the loser in Plan X vs Bronco when there were very obvious questions that IMO needed to be asked.
"An officer will escort you both to CIC," he said. And then Quincy turns up wandering around belowdecks about to pull a halon control lever? Come on, Cpt. Chandler. True to your word or the whole crew gets screwed.
Oh, yes, and then Quincy just pops up in CIC a couple scenes later like nothing happened. Wow.
Should have stopped at the nicknames. The whole homage was really overdone.
Last week, Ferris Bueller. This week, Babymetal's ギミチョコ！！ as an insert song.
What's next?
Touches all the important Peanuts mythology. Mildly amusing. Needed a few more frames of animation in parts, especially when characters handle props (apparently this was a creative choice—ill advised, IMO). Soundtrack is jarringly un-Peanuts in multiple scenes, and at the end.
What do you get when you combine stunning VFX with tracing paper–thin writing and a Kawai Kenji soundtrack? Garm Wars.
Acting: 2
Cinematography: 9
Editing: 7
Music: 10
Visual Effects: 8
Writing: 3
The opening sequence hints at a vast depth of lore that the film will explore over the next 80 minutes or so. It shows us gigantic fighting machines, a barren post-apocalyptic landscape, and a civilization so heavily networked and information-dependent that every member seems to be absolutely covered in wires and tubes.
It's great for getting your hopes up. But they'll be dragged down over the course of the film by:
1) Some shoddy VFX among the mostly well-crafted animations—especially one notably bad fire that's on screen for about ten times as long as the amount of effort put into it deserved.
2) Bad edits—worst of all, several jarringly bad continuity errors where a character's head ends up facing the precise opposite direction of the previous shot, or a hand instantly changes places.
3) The aforementioned bad writing. None of the characters seem to have believable motivations. It's basically impossible to care about anyone except maybe—just maybe—Khara-23 (and it's a stretch to even care about her).
If you want to be dazzled by some great-looking VFX set to an amazing (as usual) score by Kawai Kenji, go ahead and watch this.
If you want a story with depth, pass. The most you'll get out of this is some not-too-subtle Christ imagery (this is why I have to mark this as a spoiler).
As others (notably Simon Massey [1]) pointed out, the chemistry wasn't there. The two lead actors didn't click.
I'd go as far as to say that I didn't like Guy Ritchie's style. The chaotic sequences where 3, 4, or more camera views went sliding and gyrating all over the place to show simultaneous action were really hard to follow. Some of the edits were questionable, and a couple shots held for FAR too long (did we really need 20 seconds of slow zoom-out on Gaby sitting on her hotel bed?) dragged down the pace.
Yeah, something seemed off. I love watching the original TV series, and still want to finish it—but as for 2015 spy movies, between this and Spectre: I'll take Spectre, hands down. (Now I have to watch Mission Impossible and compare…)
I said in my review of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015) that I'd have to watch and compare this with that and Spectre… Well, here we are.
The 2015 Mission: Impossible installment roundly beats out The Man from U.N.C.L.E. in writing, production, and on-screen chemistry. Rebecca Ferguson is no Alicia Vikander (LOVED her in Ex Machina), but the interactions between both leading men worked much, MUCH better in this film. It helps that Christopher McQuarrie let this film have a much calmer editing style—it's a hell of a lot easier to follow than Guy Ritchie's chaotic simul-action sequences with 2-5 camera views on screen at once.
I'm still undecided whether I like Spectre or M:I better for my top 2015 spy film, but I'm officially knocking U.N.C.L.E. out of the running. MI-6 and the IMF can duke it out.
(It's entirely possible that I'm being easier on this film because I lack a solid background with the franchise; I've seen very little M:I compared to U.N.C.L.E. But I don't think that's why I like this one so MUCH more.)
Are these characters humans or robots? The only acting worth watching came from Reg E. Cathey and maybe Michael B. Jordan.
Not digging the schtick with the dinosaur dude. Not at all.
And who are "the calvary"? Someone should have caught that on set. (While we're on the subject of mangling the English language, apparently Brian "Recoreded" an NFL game?)
They held a certain headbutt shot waaaaaay too long—long enough to see Kara's head reverse direction. Someone needs to relearn editing.
Meh. The tone feels wrong for a spin-off of that particular film. And it's so incredibly obvious that Vega's tits are being shoved in our faces to attract male viewers—ironically that turns me off, because it doesn't fit. We CAN see through you, Hollywood.
45 minutes in, I still have almost no idea what's happening. But I've had my fill of bad foley, bad editing, obvious splices where part of a shot was replaced with a different take, poor dialogue sync, a scene where half the French dialogue wasn't even subtitled, poor dialogue replacement (including some places where characters continued talking even though their lips weren't moving)… This film might be brilliant, but I just see a lump of coal. The technical flaws could be excused if it had been made a few decades earlier, at least. But unless something drastically changes in the next 58 minutes I won't have anything to say but: "Don't bother."
Edit: It did not get better, except for about ten minutes just after the halfway mark. Oh well.
Dialogue goof right at the beginning, eh? Rusty says "Nothing more?" but all Patton said was "I have nothing to say to you, Rusty."
And it really does just end. Wow. Nothing.
"He dies at the end." First real laugh at this show.
Was an 8 until the tried-too-hard Ferris wheel scene. Ah, well.
Trigorin, eh? Hah. Best episode so far, hands down.
And now we're back to overly drawn out jokes. Lee's rant about Frozen is pretty good, though, and you only need to watch the first few minutes for that.
"Maybe I should enlist. I'll bring Julius. 'Take Your Son to War Day'."
"I'm hoping we don't get that desperate."
That's all the dialogue you need to know from this episode.
Lots of points for being thought-provoking, but points off for the ridiculous depiction of the after-school activity center.
"Co-two-du-lack"? That's not how "Coteau-du-Lac" is pronounced… It's "Coo-toe-du-lack". Learn some French, announcer guy.
Poor choice of words to say that an engine fire that disabled a ship left "thousands of vacationers dead in the water", no? Surely there was another idiom that would have served the purpose without implying that anyone died.
There are some interesting facts in this show. Too bad they're dramatically overshadowed by the hyper-sensationalized narration that attempts to make the average viewer deathly afraid of anything technological.
Oh, and most of these aren't disasters of engineering at all. The vast, VAST majority of incidents this series scrutinizes are either natural disasters that no amount of engineering could prevent or protect against; or human failures of the people responsible for maintaining the systems that were engineered to perform well within tolerances. I'm sorry, but equipment that goes 16 years without inspection, or human errors at the controls, do not qualify as engineering problems.
Skip this.
Feel-good, it is, but it's hard to overlook the slow pacing and predictability.
I think the actors did their level best to put believable characters on screen after being given very little to work with by a mediocre script. There's a lot of focus on the robot battles, but the characters seem underdeveloped.
The visual effects could be called impressive given the small budget this film had to work with, but visual effects are kind of the easy part of filmmaking these days—the software has already been written, you just have to use it.
Scriptwriting is the hard part, and this story could have said so much more. It started to develop characters in the first act, but once the action started all character work basically fell by the wayside. It's too bad, really—there's a kernel of good world-building in here that was never really utilized.
It took me (checks MAL) 486 days to force myself through this series. I have not watched the OVA. I don't need an extra 11 minutes† to know that I don't care for this show. Allegedly it still has yet to be either renewed or cancelled, but I hope that Studio 3Hz will move on and leave this behind. It really shows that production values alone cannot make an anime good. The writing in Sora no Method just isn't there, and no amount of moe can hide that.
Up next from Studio 3Hz is Dimension W, which will hopefully be better. (Yes, I'm way behind on anime.)
† - The OVA shows as 25 minutes because no metadata source that Trakt pulls in allows overriding episode duration. It's set at the show level, and that's what you get, period. It's too bad.
Random HTML code as an access log? I could make some joke about Japan being Japan, but the same kind of thing happens in American and British TV too. Ah, well.
I watched the first half of this season in 4 days, and then stalled out for 5 months. Something shifted in the tone of the show that made it suddenly a lot less interesting around halfway through. There's a bit of a resurgence during the Awa arc, near the end, but it's still a mixed bag at best.
I'm not sure if I'm interested in a second season, should this get one, or not. It's certainly scripted to set up for continuation—and there are plenty more manga volumes to adapt—but the anime might or might not continue. Maybe it will, and maybe I'll watch it. Dunno yet.
