It starts with a rather chaotic scene featuring giant robots shooting at each other, only to shift focus to a young man fainting in the desert a couple of minutes later. It’s eventually made clear that conflict has broken out between 2 nations and that one of them has discovered a special weapon that could turn the tide in their favor if only they know how to use it. Enter our fainting young man in the desert who actually knows the ruler of said nation and, surprise, can use the weapon!
That’s the bare essentials of the main story. There are plenty more characters but none of them really develop in any way. Every character introduced gets a scene or 2 to establish his/her personality and maybe a few hints about their background and past relationships. All of them fall into familiar archetypes: there’s a clueless hero, a plucky comic-relief character, a stern but well-meaning enemy commander and so forth. All the characters are potentially interesting but the short length of the movie makes the potential stay just that, potential. We’ll have to wait and see how the characters are developed in future installments.
The art and animation are good, as could be expected from Production I.G.. Though the designs of the characters and (especially) mechs are rather uninspired to say the least. There’s also the occasional still-frame here and there but these are few, far between and very short. One last complaint I have is that the bullets fired by the mechs didn’t really have much impact for me. There wasn’t much ‘oomph’ when a mech got shot down.
The audio is sufficient. The music is completely forgettable (so it’s not terrible at least), the sound-effects do their job and there’s plenty of now-popular seiyu (eg. Hiroshi Kamiya, Yuuichi Nakamura, Kana Hanazawa) to please the fans.
There were a few cool twists on certain clichés such as how every person in the movie’s world can use magic and being unable to do so is considered strange or how the main character who falls into a mech’s cockpit for the first time doesn’t immediately start kicking ass. This gave some novelty to an otherwise derivative final product.
I was entertained enough to with this movie to at least check out the next one (though it helps that it ends on a huge tease). There are some elements in here that could make for a fun experience if executed well; but whether or not the creators will manage it is still up in the air.
