Jun 3, 2020
Overall Score: Bad - 3.5
Background
Before I tear into this, let me give you some lore in case you haven't heard of Bodacious Space Pirates. B.S.P. is a great anime that I'm a personal fan of. It's about Marika Kato, a high school girl who decides to become a legal "Space Pirate" after inheriting a letter of marque from her father. Since their work is 'legal' and luxury space cruisers are insured against piracy, legitimate space pirates basically work for insurance companies and cruisers to give wealthy tourists a fun experience. They board cruisers clad in full pirate gear and basically put on a good show.
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Even though their main 'job' is mostly for show, they are legitimate pirates in an actual warship, so they do encounter real threats from time to time as well. It's a fun premise and the original show is definitely a dark horse considering how well it melds together slice of life, action, and sci-fi. It's also very pretty and the ships look darn cool. To top it all off, contrary to the title there is literally no fan service. It's a fun, cute, and wholesome show that has competent, likeable characters so I'd definitely recommend it: 8/10 for sure.
The Abyss of Disappointment
Enter Abyss of Hyperspace, the movie sequel(?) to the anime. Disappointment really is the perfect word for it considering how much I loved B.S.P. I noticed something was wrong almost immediately since some of the characters just looked different than they did in the anime. Take this with a grain of salt though; it's been a few months since I saw the main show. They also flat-out changed the look of at least one location completely, so I felt like it was at least partially a different group that made this movie. It really just looked different, not necesarily bad (aside from one ship being a CGI monstrosity towards the end), so I'll at least give them points for that. Honestly though these are minor issues in comparison to...
The Plot
Holy. God. This was some convoluted shit. It was confusing as hell, hardly made any sense, and was almost completely removed from anything that happened in the main series. Typically when you think of movie spinoffs there's a pretty tried-and-true formula if you want to chug one out; you've already got likeable and established main characters from the series so just come up with some sort of villain or situation and have your characters overcome it. In Abyss they literally INTRODUCE A NEW MAIN CHARACTER IN THE MOVIE that then becomes the center of the plot. WHAT? Who is this kid? Why should we give a shit about him if he was never mentioned in the series? WHY IS EVERYONE JUST HELPING HIM TO BEGIN WITH? The longer it went on the more frustrating it got. It even ended with a whimper that was hilariously close to Evangelion's "Congratulations!" outro. Bad bad bad.
The Characters
Even with the awful plot, I was honestly just as disappointed in the character department. Every slice of life show is character driven, and one thing I loved about the BSP characters was that they were believably competent. Marika was learning how to be a pirate, so she fumbled sometimes, but was never a bumbling idiot. Many of the supporting characters were in the same (pirate) boat; some were pretty smart, some were a bit clumsy, but everyone was mostly believable. Then here comes the movie and suddenly the smart people are elite haxxor geniuses and some of the other competent characters are just bumbling around the woods for half the movie. Not to mention the new characters (and there are only 2 of them) are so poorly fleshed out it's despicable. New character 1 is some child with daddy issues and new character 2 is the 'villain' whose entire character arc consists of her chasing newbie 1 with a stern look on her face. Buh-arf.
It really hurts seeing how bad this was. There were really only 2 moments that I felt captured the spirit of the original series for me, and the awful plot made it not even worth it for that. If you haven't heard of BSP, I'd definitely recommend the original series, but steer clear of this movie even if you were a fan of the original.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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