Macross Frontier Movie 2: Sayonara no Tsubasa – Review

Even the story’s setting backs my theory that this movie was thought up by someone who avoided using his brain.

Macross Frontier Movie 2: Happiness Is A Warm Vajra

The first movie was a condensed version of all the flaws and virtues of the series. What made it bearable was the fact that you got less of it with just a movie and you could be sure it built up to something exciting (hopefully). The second movie defies these expectations by being even more stupid than the series using even less time to convince you of that. And you may heard of it but I just wanna admit it now: This review doesn’t even come close to telling you how bad this movie is. The lack of logic in the plot for example is one of its lesser flaws. And just to give a warning: The bigger flaws are actually soul-destroying and seem like something the Wizard of Oz dreamt up.

Synopsis:
Release-Date: 2011
Running Time: 114 minutes
Synopsis:Picking up from where the previous movie left off, Ranka’s star career flourishes while Sheryl’s health rapidly deteriorates after collapsing during a live performance. At the same time, separate factions are manoeuvring behind the scenes seeking to control the Vajra horde by utilizing the singing abilities of the two songstresses. As the entire Macross Frontier fleet begins to wage the final war on the Vajra, Alto finally makes a choice between Ranka and Sheryl.
– ANN.

Like the audience the characters don’t care that much about the story. And then when they should care they don’t have the time for it. Such is the idiotic pacing of this movie and it’s just one of many flaws plaguing it.

Review:
Sometimes when you review a certain… thing you feel like banging your head on a desk is a good metaphor. And sometimes – you actually do it. So, when I imagine someone walking up to me and asking: “Was this movie any good?” I say putting on a thoughtful Aristoteles-face: “Well…
No.
It’s shit. Don’t ask me why, ever seen someone asking why shit is shit?” But that’s what I dream of at night and this is serious business. Some of you may not believe me when I’m that bluntly so for you I go into the details of what exactly makes this movie not a rollercoaster-ride you will enjoy.
This is the second movie of a soap-opera in space telling you that aliens are good and humans are also good besides the usual occasions of shooting each other. But ‘evil dies, good survives’ is a mantra you will hear uttered a dozen times during this overlong movie.
First, the length… Nearly two hours. You’ll probably remember the tragic experience of Transformers 2 and how you constantly searched Popcorn to throw at the screen asking the movie when finally real actors would appear on the screen. Well, it’s the same here: You have this huge budget of flashy action – but no brains to do anything useful with it. I accepted the first movie’s soapy nature because I expected it to end with it. This movie seemed to me like the good opportunity to get some decent shounen-action out of this. Obviously, they didn’t ask me when they made that movie. Because soapy romance-crap is still present but in this movie even the action-parts are bäd (it’s worse than just bad is what I’m saying).
So you sit through a dubious love-triangle that has nothing to do with the characters but actually simply depends on how half-assed Alto is until he remembers something nobody ever mentioned before. And what you get is action following the aforementioned mantra ‘good survives, evil dies’. You see good people die in an obscure way? Well, then they didn’t die. The first time I didn’t care because I didn’t care for the character but the third (!) time I didn’t care because I’ve thought ‘What, he dies in an explosion without having me see his corpse afterwards? Guys, he survived that, no way in hell am I gonna be fooled by this lousy script *a dozen minutes later* I knew it! He survived! So which idiot wrote that script actually…’. The action lacks tension and excitement because obviously they asked stupid fanboys to write the script for them. The whole movie seems to be just a pompous façade for the series.

Well, why don’t you ask a flower-psychologist since there are so many of them running about in this movie apparently?

The characters are unbelievably thin and one-note which is made even worse due to the fact of how the script jumps around like a stoned monkey. Seeing people interact in this movie is a good effort to convince you not to like this movie. Brera for example walks up to Ranka at night and reveals to her the whole plan of the evil guys and ends with the sudden remark that he’s her brother and then tells her what happened in her past. This whole thing happens within a few minutes and Ranka’s has just a slightly surprised “Oh, I didn’t know that…”-reaction to all that. Also, the love-triangle is resolved because Alto just suddenly remembers how he met Sheryl as a child and how their love already started at that point (why this scene really matters to both of them is questionable…). And Sheryl’s like “Stupid, you remember that now?” and I’m like “So they actually needed a deus-ex-machina to resolve a love-triangle? Good work, folks, good work…”. And in accordance with the deus-ex-machina-prinicple Ranka naturally took it like a man that she lost to Sheryl. But all this love-crap doesn’t mean anything anyway because Alto – disappears.
Now that was a stupid ending if I’ve ever seen one. The half-assed transvestite main-character disappears with the Vajra because… shit happens: he was simply at the wrong place at the wrong time. It makes you question what the movie was all about then, does it? Well, it’s about that everything has a soul: even your liver, your guts, your lungs, your kidneys, your ears, your tongue, the slime in your nose, your salvia and so on… Everything is sacred. When someone in this movie says ‘It takes guts to do this.’ – he means it literally. Your guts have a soul and this movie teaches you a bloody important lesson here (or that’s what it thinks it’s doing anyway) so think about your guts for a while and your kidneys and your liver and so on. Remember to thank them for all the soul-work they do for you. But this great revelation leads to another very troubling discovery: Vajra aren’t evil. They’re just very – sentimental. And they get easily excited and frightened – like chicken. Therefore they deserve to live – at least as much as cockroaches do. As long as humans live in co-existence with them, everything’s fine. If you’d just not step on this one cockroach in your kitchen a flower might bloom in your garden and the sun might smile upon you for another day (go figure how that exactly is supposed to work…).
That’s what the movie wants to tell you and the conflict of the movie is… I don’t know. A lot of bad humans jump around in this movie, do some shit here and there, kill each other but don’t kill any good guys. So they’re also good, I think, in a naïve way. I mean for all the evilness present in this movie the villains pretty much are all losers. ‘Evil’ isn’t a branch that makes you think of success in this movie. But I guess with the good guys being able to survive nearly everything (the ‘nearly’ was a joke of course) they just have to be losers. It was simply impossible for me to care about anything in this movie besides noticing its big budget. You know that the good guys can’t die, the love-triangle is so obvious and blatant that flipping a coin seems like a solution as good as the next one and the evil guys just run around like headless chickens that never do anything but abusing Vajra. And the most confusing of all: Without any transition the movie’s slogan became ‘Happiness is a warm Vajra’. Deadly aliens are just the kind of thing you will find plenty of pity for, right? You know how I like deadly aliens: When they are dead because Darwin sort-of said something about evolution not being a hippie-fest in the spirit of peace. But this is the movie telling you that as long as you live in peace and harmony with cosmic nature – everything’s fine. The only thing that isn’t fine here then is naturally your head in case you believe that crap.

Good things about the movie: It doesn’t make you wanna vomit. Bad things: Everything else. There are times when even a big budget and pretty animation can’t save a sinking ship. This isn’t one of these times – since following my metaphor the movie didn’t build a ship in the first place. Wooden dialogues, a stupid plot and one-note characters. Besides its animation and acceptable J-Pop this movie did everything wrong you could do wrong. You might not think it’s a comedy (it’s not that bad) but it’s hard to imagine that anyone can take this awful bore seriously.

Rating: 5/10