In Harm's Way

With a name like Harmagedon, what kind of movie would you expect? Probably a crappy one, unless you've heard that famous director Rintaro was attached. While this guy has a notorious hit-and-miss track record, even his bad stuff tends to be at least competent. And this film came right on the heels of his excellent Galaxy Express 999 movies, so it can't be too bad, I reasoned to myself.

It was. Harmagedon turned out to be an unexpected so-bad-it's-good classic.

The first thing you notice is the English dub, even if you fully intend to see it in Japanese. I did, but the first scene of a crazy blue lady prancing the moonlit streets of Tokyo got me thinking that the Japanese track was awfully flat. Only by switching over to English was I able to appreciate that “THEY ARE VANISHING! THE STARS ARE GOING DEAD, ONE BY ONE! HALF A BILLION SYSTEMS HAVE ALREADY BEEN CONSUMED! THE HUNGRY VOID IS FOUR MILLION LIGHT YEARS AWAY, BUT EVERY SECOND IT RUSHES CLOSER TO US!” Sadly, no one sounds quite as crazy, but very few deliveries actually fit the given line. Of particular trouble are the single-syllable grunts of assent or denial that Japanese is so fond of, yet the English track doesn't know what to do with. It seems like the dubbing writers had no idea how to handle extraneous lip flaps, as evidenced by a possessed cop's Kool-Aid Man shout of “Oh yeah!” to punctuate his evil monologue. There are some things that just . . . automatically place your movie in the same tier as Battle Royal High School.

Another hilarious aspect is how poorly this film is paced, though being based on a long-running book series, we'll cut it a little slack. But consider: fully half of your huge, epic, globe-trotting intergalactic psychic war is dedicated to the main character discovering he has psychic powers and resisting the call to adventure. The second half introduces about a half-dozen major characters with no backstory given, which is especially infuriating since the first half wasted time with a backstory for a character that never ends up developing at all, explaining plot points in the process that would be explained again later. The climax doesn't feel as rushed as I feared, but it never gets as epic as all the buildup would have you expect.

Also, this might be just me, but I thought some of the character movements seemed a bit awkward in an otherwise well-animated movie. Harmagedon was one of—if not the—first anime film to shoot for realism with its character designs, and while they had a lot of influence down the road, I think you can see the growing pains at times.

Now, I won't deny that Harmagedon was a fairly important work, historically speaking. Not only did it add to Rintaro's impressive resume, but marks Akira creator Katsuhiro Otomo's first foray into animation. Several other future big names can also be found here, like Yasuomi Umezu and Yoshiaki Kawajiri. The generally nice animation certianly reflects this. But Harmagedon fails as an engaging film because it has huge ambitions with a lot of narrative ground to cover, yet no idea how to fit those into its runtime. If you're not going to properly pay off a rivalry with someone's best friend later, cut the subplot out. Don't show Luna's origin story if she's not going to evolve beyond “lead psychic girl”. Focus on the action, maybe, or on showing Genma's galaxy-destroying power, otherwise we'll be disappointed when he ends up being some doctor standing in a volcano.

If you want to see an ambitious work that ends up squarely in the shitter . . . actually, watch Garzey's Wing. With Harmagedon, things never get so crazy that you can't see the potential. But as a result, Harmagedon becomes its own unique cocktail of good and bad that's much more worthy of a point-by-point analysis. Definitely give it a watch if you get the opportunity; you'll at least get the implied epic-ness of the source material, and will probably appreciate its influence on the visuals and storylines that followed immediately after. And you'll get to see Bambi being saved, so there's that, too!