There’s no doubt that Space Pirate Captain Harlock is an anime legend. The character, who has had a few incarnations, is famous. The latest adventure with the icon is a stunning full length feature film. This is a reboot of the franchise; suitable for someone coming to the series for the first time as it is for a fan revisiting the space pirate captain.
There’s also no doubt that Toei’s animation is stunning. This is the computer animation you might first have seen in the Final Fantasy movie but it has evolved and matured in time. Whether you’re looking at the character animations, with layered clothing, detailed hair and skin features or whether it is the epic space battles, planet views, aliens or the high technology on display there is visual quality that oozes from every pixel.
The running time is 107 minutes. You’ll feel that as the plot has some heavy lifting to do. We’re set in a far future when mankind’s empire has collapsed. Hundreds of billions of colonists race back to Earth only to find that the mother planet cannot possible hope to support every one.
What does humanity do? They go to war over Earth. The Homecoming War is fought to determine who gets to return to Earth and who is fated to be left out on the edges of a dying empire. The resolution is the rise of the Gaia Coalition who rule that no one is allowed back. Earth shall become a sacred place that should not be repopulated.
The catch? The authoritarian regime is happy to break their own rule by allowing their own elite to return to the planet.
Even then, that’s just the surface secrets, there are plenty more that the movie battles to expose.
It’s the hypocrisy of the Gaia Coalition that provokes Harlock into action. He becomes a pirate who takes on, with ease, apparently impossible odds as he battles the Gaia fleet.
An important twist is that this movie only has Captain Harlock as a background character. We get to experience this complex world through Logan, a young man sent by a Gaian commander, to infiltrate Harlock’s crew and get on board the ghost ship Arcadia.
Logan’s got family issues of his own – the commander who sent him into the den of pirates is his own brother.
I would have been happy to sit back and enjoy the stunning visuals. The movie won’t let me though. There’s so much plot to discover, it comes at you thick and fast. Some of the plot twists are predictable. Do we really think Logan will successfully infiltrate the pirates, betray Harlock and return to the Gaia Coalition? No. Veteran director Shinji Aramaki (Appleseed Alpha) knows this and so ensures there’s plenty to surprise us.
It just goes to show that sometimes less is more. I think the layers of plot twists eventually start to undermine the core of the plot. You stop watching to see what happens next. You start watching just to get through whatever happens next and that’s a shame.
I don’t think there’s any doubt that Harlock Spare Pirate fans should watch the movie. It’s currently on Netflix and available on blu-ray as a steelbook collector’s edition. I think there are questions whether sceptical audiences would appreciate the feature length; I suspect they wouldn’t.
I watched Harlock Space Pirate when it became available on Netflix. Since then I’ve been supplied a review copy on disc.
