Space Battleship Yamato

From my current favorite movie, Battleship, I got back into battleships and the beauty of them. Now, as one does, I started looking for the most powerful battleship built. Three candidates spring to mind: the American Iowa-class, the German Bismarck-class, and my favorite, the Japanese Yamato-class. As luck would have it, in 2005 a Japanese movie called 'Yamato' was released, a historical drama about the ship (the sinking of which was the largest single loss of human life in naval history, just saying). While looking for that movie, I stumbled onto another one, Space Battleship Yamato. This is actually a live-action synopsis of the 1974 Japanese anime.

The movie takes place in the year 2199, in which Earth is under attack from aliens called the Gamilas. It is completely irradiated and the last scraps of mankind have taken shelter underground. Any attempt at fighting the Gamilas force has resulted in failure. One day in the year 2199 an alien capsule lands, containing coordinates and a plan for a new type of engine (the wave motion engine) to get there. The leaders of (what's left of) Japan assume that since the radiation around it was temporarily diminished, the senders can eliminate radiation. They equip humanity's last remaining battleship, one built out of the remains of the WWII Yamato, also called Yamato, with that engine and a weapon based on it (the wave motion gun), and send it to the planet from which the capsule originated, Iskandar, in the Large Magellanic Cloud. After getting there, with several skirmishes with Gamilas forces along the way, one of the crew members is empowered to eliminate the radiation. Near Earth again, the Yamato is encountered by one of the Gamilas, saying that the Gamilas have given up on conquering Earth, and decide to destroy it with a missile instead. The captain orders to abandon ship and fires the wave motion gun, which is blocked from an earlier fight, destroying both the Yamato and the missile.

Space Battleship Yamato only has one drawback compared to similar movies, that being that the acting is fairly anime-like, with the characters being very stereotypical. But aside from that, the movie is one of the better ones I've seen. The story is awesome, the music very intense, and he CGI is top-notch, as in Hollywood top-notch. The fact that the movie is entirely in Japanese is slightly annoying, but Japanese is real funny to listen to.

But of course, the most important thing is the ship itself. The Yamato during WWII had 9 18"-guns as main battery, and no less than 162 one-inch anti-aircraft gun batteries. The space battleship is not only recognizable as an Earthly battleship, but actually looks better than the original Yamato. As you can see, all the guns are kept and have been turned into powerful shock cannons. But of course, the most awesome power comes from the Yamato's trump card, the wave motion gun. Even though it's fired only twice (three times, if you count the time when it was blocked and blew up the Yamato) it is more than enough to imagine the power behind it.

An overall great movie. If you know Japanese, you should watch it. If you don't, you should too. Almost as good as 2010, if you ask me.

Sorry about my long absence, by the way. I'll try to post more often.

Space Battleship Yamato by Leiji Matsumoto.