Love Position: Halley Densetsu

I decided to write this review more for its historical value than anything else – Oh, it is my first MAL review, too, so be gentle.

Love Position, Legend of the Halley was the first OVA by Tezuka Productions, a company created by Osamu Tezuka. The title was released in December 1985.

This, like so many amines of the day, was undoubtedly made with the intention of selling to the US market. For example, the opening sequences are set in a familiar Nevada desert setting (for no apparent reason). But the American influences do not stop there. The arrival off an alien agent comes straight out of the scenes when Arnie arrived to Earth in Terminator. The Vietnam War atrocities flashbacks are like homage to Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, and with a dose of Indiana Jones just to keep the Lucas fans happy.

The plot follows with a twist concerning Halley’s Comet, where an agent travels from a far off world which created Earth, traveling via the comet. But these far off beings see that humans are destroying Earth and basically not worthy, so the agent is set to destroy us. This first happened in 1910, but the agent saw the beauty of Earth and decided not to carry out its task. The present day (75 years later), the beings have sent another agent via comet express to carry out the original mission.

As you can tell, there is nothing really groundbreaking. Young man teams up with beautiful, innocent, angel-like alien against evil-looking alien who has taken the body of an escaped US convict. Bet you can not guess who wins.

It has all the clichés of its time; a love relationship hampered by an over jealous father, who happens to be the boss of a very large company, who in turn has thugs as bodyguards. One of them wants to marry the daughter in question. Also, like so many OVA’s from 80’s and 90’s, there are flaws in the plot so big one could go deep sea diving.

The artwork is great for its time, and some of the few fight scenes are well executed. There is some mild nudity, but nothing to get upset about, and it does sort of fit in with the plot.

The music is very unremarkable, though there is quite a melodic love song 30 minutes into the movie. Though one of my favourite parts is the disco scene; the dancing is hilarious.

You may be surprised, despite all of the above, that I gave this 8/10, as it really delivered everything I thought it would: crass plot, poor character development, etc. However, it just oozed that old school charm with a sprinkling of Tezuka, who only oversaw the original story.

Would I recommend it to you all? Probably not, unless you are a huge Tezuka fan and fancy watching a bit of light-hearted nonsense for an hour and half.

Helpful

read more

Let's be honest here - this is mostly just a thematic ripoff of The Terminator, as nigh-invincible massive hulking guy (who looks suspiciously like Ahhhhnold) is on a mission of destruction. It seems like nothing can so much as scratch this monstrosity.

Well, almost. There's another alien agent that was also sent to Earth, but is trying to save it. Only she's this soft, gentle, willowy, innocent girl. And yet, she is his nemesis.

The "hook" that makes this "catchy" is the convoluted and weird tie-in to Halley's Comet. For those who weren't around at the time, it was a Pretty Big Deal back in the day, and anything marketed as related to the comet would have extra cache.

Aside from the implausible and cliched general plot, they also throw in a love triangle and and abusive relationship, the story's pretty messy. On top of that the artwork is less than stellar (even when compared to its contemporaries). Sub-par all around.

Helpful

read more

TLDR; Love Position was built around a gimmick tie in to Halley's Comet and had mediocre production values, an extremely messy story, and flat characters.

Story: A hulking terminator-esque villain hunting a beautiful alien who has fallen in love with Earth was in the first place not particularly unique, but it was made even worse by being extremely muddled and hectic in its presentation. The focus jumps all over the place in both time and place between several story threads which all involve different characters (an overbearing father, Vietnam war flashbacks, the looming evil alien, and the main character's journey) all in only ~90 minutes. This does not mean the story was hard to follow just that the extreme lack of focus gave me little reason to care about what was happening, created no meaningful themes, allowed for zero character development, and meant there was no escalating tension for most of movie.

Characters: Largely as a result of the aforementioned unnecessary or overdrawn plot threads the main characters all lacked depth and experienced no growth. In particular I think the split focus between the father and son's respective relationships with the good alien was particularly harmful, and that for a movie of this length they should have been combined into one main character. The aliens were also a weak point as neither of them was fleshed out; the evil alien's only traits were walking slowly and killing people by hand (which made him unthreatening throughout the movie), while the good alien didn't communicate much with the cast outside of baby talk or briefly while in a lab.

Art: The artwork/animation was not very good. I have only seen a few anime from the mid 80s, but visually it was definitely not impressive compared to other movies of its time such as Nausicaa or Macross: Do You Remember Love?.

Sound: The OST was generic but passable, and included a lot of Harmonica playing. However, in regards to the sound effects some of the noises during the drawn out fight near the end were quite screechy/ grating on the ears.

Enjoyment: My enjoyment was pretty low because of the terrible story and lack of good characters but it was somewhat funny to watch a third rate terminator meander around along with a pretty hilarious disco dancing scene near the beginning.

Overall I would not recommend this movie unless you have some historic interest in the movie or its creators, as I found it to be extremely lacking in almost every aspect.

Helpful

read more