The issue of style over substance is something that is just as highly subjective to an individual moviegoer as comedy, or what kind of horror movie scares you more. While some may actually prefer to have such seemingly vital issues as a water tight plot and three dimensional characters fall by the wayside if the visuals are stunning enough, other simply believe that paper thin leads and a plot with more holes in it than Sonny Corleone are simply intolerable no matter how pretty a picture the director weaves. This conundrum crops up pretty much all the time in the wild world of Anime where vast, imaginative, hand-drawn worlds aren’t subject to any of the usual restraints that face a live-action film. After all, when it takes a small army of animators to scribble out a scene over a period of weeks, wouldn’t you want a bunch of stunningly visual shit to be occurring rather than just two people sitting at a table, fleshing out the plot?
This is the situation facing Yoshikazu Yasuhiko’s Venus Wars, an absolutely gargantuan sci-fi war film that ranks as one of the best looking Anime I have ever laid my bloodshot eyeballs upon; however, can some of the most stunning battle sequences the genre has ever seen manage to make up for a film that attempts to squeeze in an entire war from beginning to end in a mere hour and forty minutes?
Unsurprisingly, it’s the future and by 2089, certain cosmic happenstances have left the planet Venus habitable for human life to the point where millions not live on its rocky surface. Of course, what with humans being humans, Venus is split into two separate nation states, Ishtar and Aphrodia, and one day, completely without warning, the latter wages war on the former by displaying such superior firepower, Ishtar is under Aphrodian occupation after only a single day. Almost instantly, local police forces and politicians concede defeat and have no choice but to work with their new rulers to maintain law and order and stringent curfews.
However, some simply just can’t take being conquered in under 24 hours lying down and while so many people fall in line with the new regime, a young team of bikers from a brutal, motorcycle-based Rollerball-type sport fume from their makeshift home in a garage on the outskirts of the city. While the majority of the gang are just dumb kids who seem continuously unfocused, their team leader, motorcycle hotshot Hiro Seno burning with an incandescent defiance that the authority he once had such a problem with has now been overrun by a new, stricter authority that restrict his freedoms even further.
Adding fuel to the fire is Susan Sommers, a pushy, young reporter from Earth who had come to Venus looking for the story of a lifetime when war struck. With this volatile group of youths desperate to strike back and an impossibly bubbly reporter cheering them on and filming their every move, then soon move against the Aphrodia war machine as a tiny, guerilla force – but what hope does a bunch of rocket launcher waving punks on motorbikes have against an army that have building-sized tanks leading the charge?
So, as I was saying before: Anime can give you the key to a world where literally nothing is off the table; be it a future war on a distant planet, stretchy-limbed pirates competing in a fighting tournament, or some other mind blowing concept someone can get funding for. But while some Anime manages to stoke the intellect was well as frazzling the eyeballs, a lot usually trade on those stunning visuals and near-perfect world building to see them through and it’s really down to you to find out which ones take your fancy. A good example is comparing Vampire Hunter D and Fist Of The North Star; both come from the mid-80s, both are directed by the same guy (Toyoo Ashida) and both feature jaw dropping concepts that are admittedly as deep as a puddle in June, but I personally adore Fist while I “only” regard D as admittedly rather cool. The difference isn’t which movie managed to engage me at a fundamentally intellectual level, but instead which one had an overblown sense of style that drew it too me more; and this eventually leads to how much you’ll ultimately enjoy Venus Wars.
Visually speaking, Venus Wars made be the most accomplished Anime I have ever seen bar Katsuhiro Otomo’s peerless Akira, and even though it mirrors that towering classic in futuristic world building, stunning vehicle design, a staggering scale and more than its fair share of kickass, sci-fi motorbikes, it just can’t match it for brains or emotion. Sure, you’ll sit there glued to your seat as the film attempts to deliver a sci-fi war movie on a level hitherto unseen with huge action sequences that dwarfs anything seen in live action until CGI finally got its shit together, but by the time you get to the halfway point, Venus Wars’ weak points have been somewhat exposed.
For a start, sullen, determined street punk Hiro proves to be something of a one-note hero, lacking the oafish charisma of Akira’s Kaneda and instead quietly seething his way through the entire movie while failing to collect any empathy along the way. Similarly, his gang of friends may have all the war experience of the T-Birds from Grease, but their instantly interchangeable too and after you discover some have died after a massive action sequence, I defy you to work out who has actually croaked it after it doesn’t effect the group dynamic at all. Also, why hype up the tough, take-no-bullshit character of Miranda as someone to blatently watch because she’s totally about to do something cool at any moment – and then not do anything with her at all? By this point, the plot inconsistencies start falling like rain. Why the fuck would Aphrodian leader, Donner, hop into a tank in person to fight the final battle if his death seemingly could end the war instantly? Why isn’t the movie told more from the point of view of the far more interesting Sommers who is essentially Cailee Spaeny’s character from Alex Garlands Civil War if she was played by Elle Woods from Legally Blonde? However, while Venus Wars certainly has its narrative issues, this is where that aforementioned style swoops in and levels that playing field.
I really just can’t stress enough how great Venus Wars looks and it genuinely has setpieces that stand among the best the medium has ever seen. In fact, the extended action sequence at the middle of the flick that sees the gang take on a massive tank parked in an old stadium could, pound for pound, be the most thrilling action sequence I’ve seen from the genre’s golden period. Elsewhere, while the movie stains to find parallels typical with young people finding themselves drafted into a war they had no say in or politics that suggests both the governments of Ishtar and Aphrodia are as crooked as each other, you gravitate more to the sight of single-wheeled assault vehicles storming a capital or a huge aircraft crashing to the ground with the coolest explosions Japanese animation can buy.
And then a strange thing happens. While the characters don’t exactly break the mold, the production design and the world building is so meticulously detailed, all those narrative issues actually fade away as you’re simply thrilled to be in a futuristic world far more immersive and three dimensional then any of the characters are. Not everyone will agree, but Venus Wars ends up having a style that’s so “real”, the war itself somehow becomes the main character. War is hell, but when it’s animated as magnificently as this, it’s also pretty fucking sweet too. Thank God they didn’t set this on Uranus…
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