Space Battleship Yamato (2010)

I have seen every Space Battleship Yamato episode and movie, have been a long-time fan of this series since the 1970's, know the words to the theme songs in English as well as Japanese, have all of the model kits of all of the major ships, and have had crew as well as captain's uniforms tailor-made for myself. So as a serious fan I give my total approval for this film. It is just so wonderful I don't know where to begin.

Wonderful casting! Kimura looks the part and fleshed out the Kodai character into real life very effectively. I was so glad that his hair was not a recreation of the odd side-covering bangs of the animated character, because that would've just looked stupid. Instead, his hair was long and wavy and very J-pop style.

Wonderful job on wardrobe! The leather jackets really worked for me because they look like what real flight jackets should look like, as opposed to the white shirts they wore in the original anime. There was a great variety of footwear among the crew, from shoes to boots to steampunk-ish numbers to what looked like hiking boots (Kodai). My only complaint is that Kodai probably would have looked better with the same calf-length boots that some of the other crew were wearing, however uncomfy they are to wear. Wonderful space helmets as well, quite an upgrade from the 1970's ones which never really made much sense to me.

The guns: Wonderful job on the rifles, but I would have liked to have seen the Astro Automatic (Cosmo Nambu), which is the trademark Matsumoto gun! The ones in this film looked little more than dressed-up Glocks or HK's (I'd say Walthers as well, but Walthers actually look better than these guns did).

Wonderful live-action recreations of the most poignant scenes from the entire animated series! There is high romance and sacrifice. My only real complaint was there was not enough tenderness between Kodai and Yuki, but that may actually have slowed the pacing down too much.

Wonderful idea to cast some of the crew as female characters, especially Dr. Sado! And she acted like the original male character too, especially in the brig scene where she is visiting Kodai.

The effects...oh my god, the effects...were just unbelievably amazing! The design of the Earth ships in the beginning were the most impressive (after the Yamato of course) and totally exceeded my expectations for starship design in the Matsumoto universe. Okita's flasghip in fact may have been an homage to the real-life Bismarck because the gun arrangement was very similar to that famous German battleship's. Either that or the Japanese Kongo-class battleship which also had a similar arrangement, but the blockiness of the turrets seemed more similar to the Bismarck's! The fighters...omg the fighters...so unbelievably sexy and well thought out! They resemble the original Black Tigers and Cosmo Zero but with stealthy features and thrusters reminiscent of the F-22 Raptor, and swept-forward wings like the Su-47 Berkut! Combining design elements like that in such a thoughtful and logical manner really show that the design team knew their stuff. I was also glad that there seemed to be a much-reduced fighter complement on board (seemed like a dozen fighters or less) which is MUCH more believable than the 70 or so that the anime version carried...which is just impossible for a ship only 263 m long with most of the internal space being its space engine!

And the way the shock turrets destroyed mass numbers of the enemy...brilliant and logical

Fmovies: While it is its own film with material drawn from its rich source content (the film is mostly based on its 1974 series), one cannot help but to see shades of JJ Abram's reboot of the Star Trek film franchise here. Granted there are many parallels between Star Trek and Yamato, for starters the legendary space ships are named after their equally legendary real world counterparts, and are the best of their fleet and make in the reel world (though one comes with seat belts that got seldom used), manned by the best crew that an ideology can supply, which the story takes some pains to introduce at least their core duties on board. It's also the story of the coming of age of a young captain, where in this case Takuya Kimura's Susumu Kodai is the equivalent of James Tiberius Kirk, possessing qualities befitting a captain that he needs to realize and grow into, with that level of hot headedness and past famed exploits to allow him some gravitas and stature amongst peers and crew members.

Then of course this film went for broke in its action sequences, beginning much like Star Trek putting the audience right into the thick of a big set action piece which culminates in a loss that will shape the events of things to come, and seriously, the way the space voyagers attempted to disable an enemy planet's defenses, was uncannily similar to the Star Trek one in its approach. I suppose if Yamato had beaming technology, then this would complete its Trekkie influence, but thankfully it held back on that temptation, making it a little more challenging each time it had to reign in crew outside of its hull.

Fans of the long running series will have to accept the fact that this is not something from our generation, since a translation to film means a huge amount of compression having to take place to tell something worthwhile, creating in a sense its own version of events. It's Year 2199, and Earth is plague by radioactive attacks by the alien race Gamilas, who are adamant in creating an atmosphere suitable for their race for a total takeover. Gone are Earth's greens, and it's up to the crew of Yamato, hastily assembled may I add, to travel to the planet of Iscandar to retrieve what could possibly be Earth's last hope to restore its environment. This sets off a round trip for Yamato's voyage, and along the way the crew will face various hostilities always threatening the ship or to extinguish the hopes of Earth.

The special effects are all detailed and intricately done, so much so that they really look like something to scale and real, making space dogfights in the various Star Wars films seem like a walk in the park. It's incredibly edge of your seat stuff as ships of different sizes battling it out, and if watched in a good theatre with excellent sound system, you can bet your last dollar of feeling every laser, cannon and even the trademark of the Wave Motion Gun round that goes off. Best part is, and I think some films and filmmakers need to learn from this, is that it's never shy of utilizing its best weapon in its arsenal whenever it can, avoiding plenty of the usual cliché pitfalls of saving the best for the last. Really, whatever for, when you have a threat in front of you that you need to neutralize, why not deploy the best you have on board?

Don't expect too much character development here though, because there isn't much time to jam pack so much into what's already close to 2 hours and 20 minutes. As such the first act suffered a little from the lack of a

Unlike the American and Japanese viewers I never grew up with this in its anime form so for me it was a first taste of the franchise, and I have to say that I loved every minute of it.

I don't see any Star Trek riffs, what I see is a story about honour, loyalty to loved ones and home and a damned good tale of adventure. I saw this in Matsudo over New Year with my lady friend and we both loved it. From the stirring opening battle to the dramatic climax I was gripped.

This is light years from the cold war posturing of Star Trek, it's all about the Japanese and their ties to an iconic WW2 warship, and what it means to them. It was built to protect them from the Americans in WW2, and in space it is sent to protect mankind. (Star Trek was a rip off of Forbidden Planet anyway, so we won't dwell too much on that shall we?)

The effects are stunning. I have since seen a few episodes of the anime on You Tube and everything is spot on... the Yamato herself has to be one of the most striking spacecraft ever to set sail for the stars.

I love it... 10/10

Space Battleship Yamato fmovies. I have to say that i think one of the best things to take away from this movie also seems to be one of the things which nobody considers.

I'm not familiar with the original series or comic so i can not attest to its being good or bad in that sense. What i am familiar with is the historical significance of the battleship Yamato and the symbolism and slight role it played in WWII for the Japanese People. Japan had one of the most powerful navies (and arguably the most powerful)in the world at the beginning of hostilities in the Pacific theatre of WWII. By the 6th of April 1945 when the Yamato left port for the last time, the Japanese navy had been ravaged, they had lost most of their carriers and cruisers with only about 10% of its original naval forces remaining. The Yamato and a few escorts were to attempt to attack the now Allied occupied Okinawa in a near-futile attempt to deal a blow to the US fleet. She was destroyed en-route to the battle by relentless air attack by the US and never got to use her 9 46cm batteries, the largest in existence at the time. This story is about hope, honour, and the tenacity of the Japanese people as a whole. Of course it was corny, they raised the hulk of the ship out of the ground! And besides bearing a resemblance in spirit its clearly not the actual ship, its about 5 times as large. The acting was perfectly appropriate for the type of story this was and despite a few drawn out scenes i was still very entertained. Sure, some of the CGI at the end was, to quote another review, "dodgy", but for the most part actually pretty good. But, thats not what this movie is about.

Its about the symbolism of a desperate mission which only a Japanese navy would have taken, its about remembering history, and its about transferring it to a modern setting of hope prevailing in a time of despair. Enjoy the CGI, enjoy the space battles, don't worry about the inconsistencies with weapons and apparent inept "Gamillas" forces towards the end (maybe new recruits?),and instead enjoy the heroes and unmistakable, "fight to the last man" mentality and Japanese spirit which comes through in every scene.

While I'll grant you similarity in the setting of a space cruiser named after a famed WWII ship in space (USS Enterprise was a famous WWII air craft carrier, senkan Yamato was a famous WWII battleship), beyond that, nothing about Yamato has anything to do with Star Trek other than Matsumoto Reiji may have been inspired by it.

That said, no further invocation of American media landmarks is necessary in discussing this title.

The film was entertaining. I didn't look at the clock until the end. At times, the film was a bit melodramatic but all-in-all the movie was good.

The special effects were very good. I've heard it said this was a low budget film. I can accept that assessment. But the story telling was decent and conveyed the starry-eyed intensity of the comic nicely!

There were some downs but the only one I'd bother with was the romance between the main character and the ace pilot. It hit me like a pizza delivery scooter from outside my peripheral vision. Never saw it coming and didn't quite understand it.

In the end, I enjoyed it and I'd recommend people familiar with the comic/anime series check it out.

... should have been made by the people who made this "live-action" Space Battleship Yamato (2010) movie-- which is based on the Classic (first major "space opera"-- after Star Trek, before Star Wars) animated TV series of the same name , and much closer in style and content to Star Trek The Original TV Series... since it doesn't devolve into the teen-angst or "slo-mo" action of recent Hollywood blockbusters.

The source material is given many judicious "updates" which largely made sense to me from a story, if not production, stand-point: e.g. the talking robot "Analyzer" is now a "SIM" module which you can load into other devices and the aliens are now truly "alien" with technology and energy signatures which humans have difficulty detecting or understanding.... And the writing is smart enough to make light of the "old-schooled" stuff they keep-- like their costumes ("we're still wearing this?") and one-liners. In fact, there is so little "fan-service" or "sequel baiting" that non-fans probably won't realize that this is an adaptation of a 1970s TV animation series (using the ORIGINAL music)!

P.S. To anyone who thinks that the characters' reactions to the movie's apocalyptic story is unrealistic (taking time to make decisions, say farewells, mourn/salute the dead)-- just look at how real Japanese people deal with their earthquakes and tsunamis.

Owing to the fact that the Japanese "general movie audience" is not that much larger than the Japanese anime/manga audience, there is no faux issue of "re-imagining" the source material for a "new/larger" audience-- and the writers rise to the monumental task of "condensing" many epic, if episodic, story-arcs (which should have taken a trilogy, if not a series of 7/8 movies) into a single feature film... by focusing on the STORY! In fact, this movie is so tightly structured that the only really unexplained or implausible thing in it is probably all of the actors' great hair... and the secret lies in using sci-fi movie tropes (most of it actually originating from their source material), NOT explaining them-- since no amount of techno-babble will turn a plot device into reality.

Which is where, I believe, this movie will divide audiences into fans and non-fans of the source material (or sci-fi/anime in general)-- a downside of all this emphasis on story is, of course, a relative lack of characterization.... Though thankfully, anime stereotypes have at least one more dimension than their Hollywood counterparts and the casting is mostly SPOT-ON (you who believe skinny anime characters with fluffy hair do not exist in Japan, repent!) And some inevitably heavy narration and exposition which might have been risible were thankfully short, focused and well-delivered-- with a touch of self-awareness (*eye-rolling*) by the characters themselves. And as expected, veteran actors deliver their lines and inhabit their characters without batting an eyelid, while younger cast members are less convincing with their histrionics.

So while this might seem like a pretty generic space adventure to "general audiences"; it is and has always been intended as a treat for the fans. And this movie won me over for the simple fact that, after decades of Star Wars and Star Trek, it could still make me go "WOW..." every time an alien or a space-ship appeared, for all of 3/4 of a second-- beca