Space Battleship Yamato

In all honesty, I cannot say a lot of good things about this movie. It seems to be a mashup of a few Sci Fi films from the past decade or so, directed in the style of Michael Bay.

Seriously I was half expecting to see Bruce Willis reprise his role or Kodai's last line to be "We Win, Gracie"

It was as if they had planned to do a great movie, Saw the stunning success of Star Treks' reboot and thought "yeah the Yamato franchise is tired as hell,. let's kick it in the guts and see what reworking we can do"

The best analogy is ST but Kirk being replaced by Kirk's Dad and the USS Kelvin at the end and thats it.

there were some original bits but more likely as not cribbed from a few hits. I don't mind reverse stealing of film ideas tho..

It's the execution I found so annoying with this film.Wanting. The acting was on a level best found with year nine drama students, the dialogue was overly melodramatic at best and while the CG was great its attempt at Galactica Style character discovery and analysis fell down horrifically flat. Seeming forced and contrived.

The worst part is I KNOW it could have been a paradigm better than what it was. Ought to have gotten Ron Moore to rework the script and storyline. They did take some JJ Abrams directly in as much using Real ship settings for some parts like the hangar decks. It may even be salvageable, if re edited. At around 120 minutes it was Overlong without being special because of its length. It could be made that bit punchier if sped up, and hopefully a better film. BSG had loads of talking and not a lot of Battle CG and it was widely regarded as one of the best TV shows of the decade,.. not just a good sci fi show but a great regular show in and of itself.

The SBY reboot i think needs a reboot

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 proper introduction on characters and their motivations, preferring to keep you in suspense as it slowly unravelled them, sometimes just through a one liner in passing. You'll soon acquaint yourself with the crew enough to know their core function, and most of them time everyone sticks to their one single function on board the ship. The end result is a rather choppy beginning just as Yamato finds its feet in its maiden voyage, before things smoothen out as the voyage progressed. With a new crew in a new ship also come the avenues for mistakes to be made, and one of the more telling one is how everyone let their guard down en route to base (common pitfall in the military), where one's guard should be up until you actually reach paradise.

The other issue I found wanting in a minor way, though it still worked, was Takuya Kimura's presence. He's such a big star, and is really charismatic on screen that my memory of the Kodai character pales in comparison, but like how Tom Cruise's Mission: Impossible was, my memory of Yamato was that this was a group attempt and mission, which Kimura's star power inevitably made him prominent in every step of the way through the story as if it's solely a one man show, often overshadowing that of his co-stars such as Meisa Kuroki (who is a big name herself), Toshiro Yanagiba and Tsutomu Yamazaki, who plays the ship's Captain Okita, responsible for crafting the mission of hope that Yamato finds itself in. Throwing in a romantic subplot for good measure that was expected though hurried, and side characters such as Analyzer the robot was fun, but could have been better executed rather than a short supporting appearance.

Still, Space Battleship Yamato is one nostalgic guilty pleasure. It helps if you have a little bit of a background on characters and motivations, as the story hits the ground running at breakneck speed from the get go, and is a special effects romp that will wow even the most jaded of audiences who have seen one space battle too many.

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.

This latest production of Reiji Matsumoto's classic series deserves high ratings for its production value especially considering its low budget of 12 million USD, which is less than a fifth of average Hollywood motion pictures.

In the year 2199 earth is under attack by planet Gamiras and is hopelessly contaminated by radiation. One day they receive a transmission from planet Iskandar with a plan for warp engine and a wave cannon. In their last hope, people of Japan uses this information to transform battleship Yamato - a world war II relic that is now exposed out of a dried up sea bed into a spaceship. They set out to Iskandar which exists in the great Magellan nebula in hopes of finding an answer to earth's problem.

I see touch of Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica in the overall looks and feel of the props, ships and the battle sequences, but it's certainly the very best special effects science fiction I've ever seen to come out of Japan. I'd say that Japanese sci-fi have finally come of age in this movie.

The final sequence of this movie is very Japanese in my opinion, and might be over melodramatic for the international audience, but the movie was made for the Japanese viewers, so I don't have any problems there.

Takuya Kimura has a habit of stretching out the ending of a word when calling out orders, and speaking dramatically which sounded odd at times, and the dead pan acting of Meisa Kuroki could have been more charming, but overall things were believable and didn't mess up the story.

Beautifully done movie with real feeling of being out there in space, with unbelievable special effects considering its budget. This is certainly the best sci-fi movie to come out of Japan, and is Toho's new masterpiece.

OK so why Japanese movies don't have higher budgets? These types of movies deserve much more money. What they can do with 20x time less than US movies is amazing.

Excellent work, excellent movie, please film more of such Sci-Fi movies, this is great. More more more ! I just can't believe that we could get for instance 16 movies of such quality e.g. 12 milion per movie = $200 million, and one US movie costs $200 million(Transformers). I could watch 10 movies instead of 1, that would be superb ! Blu-ray's here I come :-)

I mean Transformers for example are ALL about mambo-jumbo folks, some teen "superstars" and we have a movie - WRONG ! Quality movie doesn't requires superstars, it requires good story, great directing and great production. 'Yamato' movie showed us that.

Now about the movie, effects, robotics etc only Japanese can do that, nice stuff guys. Love the sound, and sound effects.

Enjoy watching this !