Aero-Troopers: The Nemeclous Crusade

Badly written, slow sci-fi animation story. Characters are cardboard which perhaps fits the puppet like animation. Miserable pacing of the story.

Action sequences are not edited well and are difficult to follow. Background animation is miserable and often out of focus. Obviously this is a low budget attempt.

The dialogue is ludicrous. They all seem to talk like Yoda from Star Wars? Why?

There are good ideas here; just poorly executed.

Don't waste your time. Not even worth a rental.

So many "Oh's", so many "ah's" and so many "Aaah's" Are said in this poorly animated mess of a film you'd swear that the script was written by a robot who constantly loves to say stuff like that.

How Mark Hamill and the other talanted VA's got involved in something like this still remains a mystery.

In today's computer animation age this film is at the bottom of the barrel. The animation is jerky,lip syncing is non existent and the overall look of the film is amateurish. However I've always had a soft spot for small studios that attempt big things. There no doubt that with companies like Pixar,Dreamworks and Blue Sky studios film like this are a joke.

Nueart Pictures tried to produce a science fantasy about a world of floating land masses,where no gravity exist, and dirigible are the main means of transport. I love computer animation yet with the exception of Pixar studios's The Incredibles, all the big studios are making are comedies with talking animals. And only small animation houses (mostly European and Japanese) are attempting to use this medium for more mature audience.

The story is about a boy (Joshua) who dreamed of the flying the winds. This takes him on an adventure against a mechanical whale that has been terrorizing the skies. The pace is set through narration by an older Joshua via The Wonder Years TV series. The story shares bits of Moby Dick and Frankenstein. There is some violence and death so this isn't intended for young children. And that's why I'm giving it five stars out of ten. It would have been more if they had polished the story more. However they did avoid the easy path of creating some flying talking animals, a princess and have an unlikely nerdy hero learning a life lessons while saving the day.

It is my hope that one of the major studios will attempt in the near future to give science fantasy genre a try without cartoon-like traits. May I suggest Final Fantasy 7: Advent Children. Which I recommend before looking at this valiant attempt but utter failure.

The Nemeclous Crusade is unlike anything else in science fantasy. Combining superior CGI visuals with the spirit of 1930s sci-fi magazines, it combines to keep the viewer interested and then some as it proceeds through its world of the sky. The story involves Joshua, a boy who becomes a warrior for a sky-based civilization that is battling a gigantic sky-ship that resembles both a whale and a shark. Joshua's relationship with his mentor and with a girl who lands on their sky-ship and assists in the battle with the whale/shark sky-ship becomes a focal point of the story, told throughout with the feel of a chapter of a biography. The film succeeds in making Joshua a fascinating individual and compels the viewer to see his struggles with an intensity that caught me by surprise the more I watched the film.

The surreality of this world of the sky easily draws the viewer in and keeps the viewer fascinated to the end, making for a sleeper science-fantasy triumph.

It was a different kind of animation. The story line needed some work. But the background of the story, the floating islands of trees reminds me of a book by Larry Niven called "The Integral Trees" Where a smoke ring around a neutron star supported plant and animal life. The people that lived there were in a constant state of free-fall or zero gravity. They lived on huge trees that were in my minds eye very similar to the floating forests in Aero-Troopers. I liked the bit were the kid made his own glider. And being able to fly under your own power was interesting. How the instructor teaching the cadets had a very eastern way of speaking.