With a movie with a premise that is basically just if Steven Spielberg’s Artificial Intelligence was a romance anime, one would think Hal would be a pretty epic film. And it seems like a lot of people thought that it WAS epic and were pretty depressed after watching the ending. But personally, I couldn’t get past its major flaws enough to really feel invested.
The main problem? The characters. Which is pretty fatal considering that this is a movie on characters. It’s so disappointing because I think the film was great in all other departments. The art was excellent both frame-wise and conceptually. I loved watching their glimpses of the streets of Japan. And might I just add, the water in the climax was GORGEOUS (we will set what happened in that scene). The plot was also great. I love a good psychological sci-fi (although I, like a few others, wish that they explored this a little more). I thought the plot ended with a pretty interesting conclusion, even if it was a bit of a stretch. The only reason I didn’t get choked up by the ending was because I felt like I didn’t even know the characters, which brings me to my next point…
The audience must feel like they understand the characters in order to connect to them. Even if the character is “mysterious” at least that’s something the viewer can say about that person. But in the case of Hal, it feels less like the writers were being purposely ambiguous about the nature of their characters and more like they just didn’t take the time to characterize them enough. Even when some interesting ideas were brought up about the characters, they were very quickly skimmed over as soon as they were dropped. For example, I wish the writers had added a bit more about Hal’s backstory. The flashback to him and Ryu as kids was actually intriguing and I kept expecting them to connect back to it and they never did. I also wish that they explained the dynamic of Hal and Kurumi’s relationship. There isn’t really much there for us to learn about them and at some point it seemed from a flashback that they might’ve had kids together, but then we never hear anything about the kids again? The pace of their reunion was really wonky too. Where was the build up to that?? At the time, the audience was made to believe that HAL was the robot so wouldn’t make sense to have Kurumi be disturbed that her dead boyfriend is in front of her, but not really?? Of course eventually there would be a point where she would warm up to him, but the writers completely skipped over the “warming up period” which really bothered me. And as a result of all these problems, any moments in the film that were supposed to feel dramatic felt very “meh” to me.
In conclusion, if you like sappy love stories, I recommend this, but it is nothing groundbreaking by any means. I do think that this film took a rather mature look at relationships in contrast with most other romance anime which tend to be a bit more juvenile (not me trashing on romance, just objectively, they tend to target younger audiences). The movie is pleasant enough and doesn’t overstay its welcome.
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Score Breakdown:
~ Story ~
6
~ Art ~
10
~ Sound ~
6 (generic, but it gets the job done)
~ Characters ~
3
~ Enjoyment ~
6
~ Overall ~
6
