Venus Senki

「Venus Senki」 proudly describes itself as a war movie with a strongly pronounced anti-war sentiment.
Unfortunately, it doesn't quite understand what that phrase means.

The story is set in the near future on a partially terraformed Venus, a fact that matters for the opening text blurb and never again: the planetary environment, which might as well be vaguely post-apocalyptic Tokyo metropolitan ruins for all the difference it makes, never plays into the story in any meaningful way, and looks just like every other drab exoplanetary landscape of its contemporary sci-fi anime.

The sci-fi elements of this movie are of the hard and grounded variety, to the point ... of being outright primitive; most of what you see is intimately familiar from the mundane reality, with the exception of some vehicles designs, which are for the most part comically impractical and antiquated even by the 1989 standards.

The 1989 standards for production quality of anime movies are outside my area of expertise, but going in without expectations, I was satisfied with the detailed artwork, vivid special effects and animation that is capable of fluidity and a certain old-school grace when it wants to; unfortunately, even though this movie is capable of delivering both impressive vistas and intense action sequences, most of its screen time looks good in an unremarkable way.
The same can be said about the sound, which is used competently and does a good job accompanying the visuals, but is unremarkable otherwise. The soundtrack also contains a couple cheesy 80s pop songs which are used to bolster some of the character-focused scenes and, as I've been told, can be enjoyed on their own merit if you're into those kind of things.
What I didn't particularly enjoy about the sound of this movie is the voice acting: it is satisfactory in a dry, professional way yet largely lacks nuance and therefore prevents the characters from expanding beyond their respective personality cliche, with a couple of notable exceptions.

Unfortunately, neither of the standout characters belong to the main cast, and for the vast majority of this movie you are going to be stuck with a band of 80s action movie tropes and side characters who are largely irrelevant to the plot(compared to the amount of time they occupy) and are written in a realistic enough manner to be outright dull, which would have been fine if those characters were used for something like a coherent commentary on the effect war has on a regular civilian's psyche, but the script stops one step short of even that, which makes for a rather frustrating experience.

But not nearly as frustrating as the script of this movie, which sets up a complex geopolitical plot in the opening minutes only to tear it down immediately with an extremely dumb scene that lacks any authenticity regarding military strategy and the realities of urban warfare; which bluntly narrates how tragically meaningless armed conflicts are, then proceeds to exult in a protracted colorful combat scene straight from some action comedy, which sacrifices basic physics, damaging properties of large-caliber artillery weapons and common sense at large for the sake of spectacle; and which by the end of the movie pretends it was an anti-war human drama all along, and demands an emotional response which is completely unearned.

「Venus Senki」 is an exasperating muddled mess, which I can only recommend watching in good faith if you crave seeing a tank getting taken out by a excavator crane.