What if I were to tell you that there was a sci-fi movie out there with the look and feel of “Battlestar Galactica,” the CGI and SFX of “Star Trek” and the storyline of “Star Wars”? You’d scoff and walk away, right? Such a movie couldn’t be that awesome and not have a Shia LeBoeuf-sized problem. Well, Toho Studios — the same guys that brought you lulz with Godzilla — has the movie that puts the B.A. back in battleship: “Space Battleship Yamato.”
The live-action remake of the iconic anime franchise “Space Battleship Yamato,” known in North America as “Star Blazers,” takes place in 2199. The Gamilas, a hostile alien race, nukes Earth back to the Stone Age. They do such a good job that all of humanity begins to succumb to radiation poisoning, even after fleeing underground, its extinction predicted to occur in one year. Earth is all but dead when a capsule containing a message from Queen Starsha of the planet Iscandar crash lands on Mars. She says she has a device on her planet in the Large Magellanic Cloud called Cosmo Cleaner D (Cosmic DNA) that can clean the radiation, and provides blueprints for an FTL drive: the wave motion drive. The drive is secretly built in and equipped on an ancient Japanese battleship, the Yamato, and is launched in a race to aquire the Cosmo Cleaner D and return it to Earth within the one year time limit
This trailer, for lack of a better word, and in short, is PHENOMENAL. The quality of the VFX seriously casts shame on “Star Trek,” “Tron 2.0” AND the yet to even be made “Starfighter.” I understand bits and pieces of Japanese, but trust me, as long as you know that “hassha!” means “fire!” the language barrier is immaterial, this trailer is that good (and if it’s released here, it’ll be either subbed or dubbed, hopefully the former). From what I can tell, the movie stays pretty faithful to the anime and manga from which the movie is derived. The ONE thing that this trailer does not have is a shot of the legendary (and “original”) BFG: the Wave Motion Gun, or simply Wave Gun, though the very last thing you hear is Captain Okita ordering the Wave Gun to be fired. Great move, because this gun is iconic for being the biggest destructive weapon this of the Death Star, and I’m pretty convinced the Wave Gun would give the superlaser a good run for its money, and to have it in the trailer would just not be right.
If I could relay a message to Hollywood, knowing my deep seated aversion to the many films produced by industry it would be this: If you pick this movie up from Toho and do right by it promotionally and at awards time, I will forgive the last few years of misfires, because this is the movie that, if done right, could bring Hollywood back to its former glory. Wanna hear it from a higher authority? Okay. To quote what both Deric Hughes (writer/editor for Syfy’s Warehouse 13) and Robert Meyer Burnett (Hollywood writer and director) told me on twitter about three minutes before I started writing this piece, “Hollywood, get on this [expletive deleted]. NOW!’
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Follow Chris Hyatt on Twitter at http://twitter.com/hyattch.