More on that space battleship

I need to sleep on a movie before blabbing about it.

So... Space Battleship Yamato...

This film was released in Japan in early 2010. The initial trailers were pretty awesome. Epic space battles and all that fun stuff.

The trailers did the movie justice.

The premise of the movie... (could be spoiler-ish if you've never seen the anime)

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It's the 22nd century. Earth has developed space travel within the solar system. That's when an alien race comes along and bombs the human race beyond the stone age with "meteor bombs".

The meteor bombs make the Earth's surface unable to sustain life thanks to radiation and all that fun stuff. Earth has gone from green/blue to very Martian-red.

Ecologists and biologists are, by this point, having aneurysms, but I digress.

Earth's remaining space fleet is getting its ass kicked by the much superior aliens. Then, in true deus ex machina fashion, a message/probe from a far-away alien world comes to Earth. It contains schematics for a faster-than-light propulsion method for spaceships, a superior energy system, and coordinates.

So the Earth survivors (who apparently are all Japanese... the rest of us got obliterated, I suppose) convert the World War II battleship Yamato (the one the U.S. forces sunk in 1945) into a space cruiser. They use the new technology to beef up the weapons and include a super-cannon in the nose of the battleship that they call the "wave-motion" gun. It's essentially an unstoppable death ray that causes a horrible drain on the ship's energy supply.

So the Yamato takes off and experiments with this faster-than-light drive to try to get to this alien world and secure a magic technology that will restore the Earth.

The crew includes:

* Captain Okita, a grizzled veteran of past battles with the hostile aliens
* Susumu Kodai, the young, dashing, hero. He's an ace pilot, brash leader, etc. etc.
* Yuki Mori, the love interest for Kodai.

And there's others, but really they're all subordinate roles.

In the American release of the anime, all these characters had "Americanized" names but that's really not relevant here.

So the film starts with space battles. There's the obligatory obtaining the message/technology from the distant world (called "Iskandar") then getting the crew together and blasting off in the Yamato to fight through the aliens.

There's the introduction of the characters. There's character drama. There's more battles. There's... um... more character drama. There's a romance in there. There's lots of alien battles.

There's a shitload of people getting blasted.

There's a lot of explosions. Y'know, 'cause of the battles.

I'm not going to spoil with details. None of this is shocking if you know anything about the series at all.

The film does not follow the anime precisely. There's a LOT of corny, cliche-ridden junk in this.

And it works. Oh, does it work.

This is not Shakespeare and it's not meant to be. This is a space opera in the grand fashion of space operas. It's not supposed to have great acting. It's supposed to have over-acting stuff where men are manly men, aliens are aliens, and spaceships are spaceships (and all that stuff).

It's cheesy. Oh god is it cheesy. It is soaked in cheese then sprinkled with nacho cheese for more cheesy flavor.

For all that, the film-makers actually succeed. It's not injected with any artificial gravitas or depth. It's a fun, ridiculous, over-the-top movie.

They should have released it in the U.S. in general release.