Venus Senki is a 1989 anime film following a bunch of bikers caught up in a war on a colonised Venus in 2089. Unfortunately, it is a classic case of style over substance.
I think a few things just got forgotten about during Venus Senki's production; Gary's death stood out to me in that it didn't stand out, he just falls to his death and nobody mourns him or even mentions the fact that he just died. Another one is this chap in the army who has maybe two minutes of relevancy, he hits on Hiro, Hiro sees a montage of moments he spent with this chap but weren't shown on screen beforehand, and then the chap gets blown up a bit later. I couldn't tell if Hiro's little montage of memories was meant to imply that he was gay, or whether it was meant to be some sort of death flag. I get there's a limit to how much time they had to dedicate to it, but Hiro and Maggie's relationship does not change in any way throughout the course of the film. This is fine I suppose, but ultimately makes their moments together a bit boring. I thought a love triangle was going to develop when the girlboss stood up for Hiro, so I give credit where it's due and applaud Venus Senki for not falling into that trope, because as it turns out men and women can be friends and stand up for each other without wanting to snog afterwards. Oh and one more strange thing, the main antagonist was presented as being very calm and collected even when held at gunpoint, but during the final showdown he had suddenly become extremely brash and gets himself killed.
The visuals are really the only thing that make this film worth watching, some very spectacular character and mechanical animation is on display here, as well as an interesting scene which uses live action background footage. This semi live action scene is executed about as well as it could have been, but it was still slightly jarring to me; someone clearly wanted to experiment and that's fair enough. The colouring is brilliant, bedazzling at the start and becomes less so as the war goes on. At times, the scenes with grittier, plain colour schemes would not have felt out of place in an anime that came out today if it weren't for the older art style.
The voice acting is fairly unremarkable, but there are a few famous voices in this film who are well cast but also sort of typecast.
Despite having major flaws, I would actually recommend Venus Senki to anyone with time to kill, there are far worse anime films of the same era with much bigger cult followings. Anyone who writes stories may also be able to take a look at Venus Senki as an example of what happens when you forget things about your own story.
My rating: 4/10
16/09/2024