Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
We head off to the far future in our final 3D anime adventure, with Harlock: Space Pirate, or those words in different orders depending on the part of the world you are in. Somehow I’ve saddled myself with trying to recap this, which was an oversight on my part to be honest. I intend to give you more of the broad strokes here, because frankly I’m not all that sure that the film knows its own details, or perhaps just didn’t translate them properly.
In the distant future, mankind has spread across the galaxy but found no aliens of note, which it claims to be a major part of the species’ collective ennui, although in the same sentence it also introduces a race of space elves that might or might not be composed of dark matter, which might or might not be actual magic. Hard science, or understandable, this film is not.
With galaxy-wide resources dwindling, humanity wants to return to the idyllic Mother Earth, however the ruling Gaia Sanction disagrees, declaring Earth a sacred planet forbidden to humanity, from their Space Hammer inspired spire palace. One man seeks to undo this, broadly speaking, that being Space Pirate Captain Harlock and his gang of space pirates, and their almost comically over-sized, skull-laden space super dreadnaught, who have been stealing futurenukes to blow up time. Don’t ask.
Admiral Isora of the Gaia Sanction, unable to stop Harlock through conventional methods instead hatches a plan to embed his younger brother Yama on Harlock’s crew. Despite seeing through this ruse instantly, it seems to make no difference to Harlock, perhaps because he’s too busy muttering about fate and destiny and all that to care, like the massive edgelord that he is.
Telling you much more than that is a bit of a waste of time, because even that little recap thus far is not so much recontextualised as completely ret-conned approximately every ten minutes, with increasingly zany soap opera histrionics ratcheted up, particularly between Isora and Yama, until it reaches an end where I think someone was firing Jupiter at someone else? To be honest, I’d completely given up trying to follow any of this after the first hour, so I’m not 100% sure.
I think the politest thing I can say about Harlock is that it is entirely preposterous, which is why I’m a little surprised to hear myself say that I didn’t entirely hate it, despite its apparent best efforts. That’s the power of completely gratuitous space battles, I suppose.
That aside, and not all that far to a side at that, there’s not a lot to recommend in Harlock, apart perhaps from a couple of cool character designs, namely Harlock and, well, Harlock’s ship, which probably has more personality than the supposed protagonist. The rest of the film’s characters and animation are incredibly inconsistent – there’s some scenes and designs that clearly have a lot of time and effort put into them, like that aforementioned spire palace thing, and then there’s scenes that look like they’re using in-game footage from a Playstation 2 era Final Fantasy game.
What I’m trying to say is that even with me cutting this more slack that I’d care to justify, this is still a baffling experience, but in a bad way that’s very hard to care about. Give it a wide berth. Me hearties.