First and foremost, I have to say the CGI aircraft are beautiful.  Not only are they amazingly detailed and well designed, but the post effects give them a verisimilitude that is hard to beat.

On the other hand, the characters are so bland and pale, even though that fits with the story, it was hard to get too wrapped up in them.

Plot stuff below the fold, including spoilers.

The idea has been done to death in Anime, that War is bad, War is corporate, and War is done for Bread and Circuses.  Well, this is another one, with the added element of the fact that the fighters are Kildren.  No, that's not a typo for Children, but you'd only be half wrong.  Given some possibly false story about that being the name of a drug that stops aging, the term now applies to a generation, or at least a cluster of these fighters who never age to maturity, and can only die when killed in battle, which they are, on a regular basis.

We have the new pilot, Yuichi Kannami, and a few archetypes, and the female base commander, Suito Kusanagi.  They are all Kildren, physically aged somewhere in the 16 range, I'd guess (it's not mentioned, but they're physically mature, just not adults.).  The staff of mechanics are not, and they do their best to hide their weariness of having seen it all before.  They all work for one of the war corporations.  As a plus though, we are never shown anything about this corporation, with stereotypical jaded and evil executives.  The series stays down at the unit level, bringing to mind the atmosphere of a proper war movie set in the European countryside at a remote airbase.

They conduct patrols and engage with the fighters of a rival corporation.  There is an enemy ace who is rumored to be an actual adult human, but nothing much comes of that other than a lot of the pilots are taken out by him.

Apparently the side effect, as far as I can tell, of being one of these guys is a lack of curiosity.  They don't care about the situation they're in, don't often engage in the typical anti-war anime whining about the horrors of killing (while being particularly good at it), they just kind of float along with the "Eh, this is my job" attitude and a lack of long term memory.  As a result, the pace is very, very slow.  But eventually we learn things, like how Kusanagi (not Major....) has been around long enough that she HAS questioned the order of things.  She even has an 8-year-old daughter.  She has also killed Yuichi's predecessor, who was her lover.

Eventually hints begin to surface, like when a white haired pilot from the squadron is killed early on, he is replaced later with a virtually identical white haired pilot, who even shares his peculiar habit of folding and creasing the newspaper when he's done reading it.  And yet, this arouses no real curiosity in Yuichi, other than mentioning "We used to have a guy who did that too."

This should lead you to believe that they are really clones, programmed with the same experiences so that their skills aren't lost.  This would explain why Yuichi and Suito become lovers again, and eventually, they make a pact, something about finding some way to break the cycle.  And she shoots him (again) when he won't shoot her (this time).  Post credits, we see an echo of the opening, as a new pilot arrives, and one-handedly lights the match for his cigarette and extinguishes it exactly the same way.  I give them credit though for explicitly NOT showing his face as he goes to Suito's office and checks in.

In the end, nothing is resolved, nothing really changes, so I guess this is one of those "The horrors of war are endless" stories.  The bland characters whose designs make them look as tired as they act don't go anywhere.  Even the world-weary chief mechanic simply accepts this reality and can't really care about the endless supply of apparently disposable pilots.

But hey, at least the dogfighting scenes are incredibly gorgeous.

Posted by: Mauser at 11:42 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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