Leiji Matsumoto (Final Yamato and Adieu Galaxy Express 999) is credited with the original story here. Most importantly for our purposes though, he created Captain Harlock, the craftiest space rogue of them all!
Being way too lazy to try and track down the Harlock movie, The Arcadia Of My Youth, I settled on Cosmo Warrior Zero since it was a brand new tale about some loser who is going to try and bring Harlock to justice.
The selling point of this series is that I can watch Harlock stand around, assuming pirate poses on the bridge of his fearsome ship, the Death Shadow.
I didn’t get this thing to watch some dingus named Warrius Zero, decked out in a loud yellow coat, whine endlessly about how the Machine Men killed his family, but now that the war is over they all have to work together.
So, just what has Harlock gone and done now to bring the heat back on his tail? Remember the war between the Machine Men and humans? Sure you do, it’s pretty much detailed in some form in virtually all space-oriented anime.
After the war was over and an uneasy peace reigns, there’s still many humans who don’t like these Machine Men and the pirates that roam around in space cause trouble by hunting these robot bastards down.
Harlock has been doing that and the higher ups in the government don’t appreciate it. Zero has a brief encounter with Harlock at the beginning of Episode 1 and gets smacked down like the space bitch he is.
Back at HQ, he gets assigned to go and bring Harlock in. If it seems a bit counterintuitive to have the guy that didn’t last five minutes against Harlock be put in charge of arresting him, then you’ll understand that there’s probably something dastardly afoot with this whole business.
Zero agrees to go after Harlock on the condition that he get his old ship back. Since we’ve just met Zero, this has little impact on us and doesn’t seem to matter much in the grand scheme of things. It’s not like he’s getting the Death Shadow or anything.
Still, maybe some back story on this guy beyond the “I lost my family in the war” bit would have been useful so that we actually cared what flying boat he hauled his crybaby butt onto.
He gets his old crew back, but has a new first mate who is a woman named Marina Oki. Oki encounters some sexism on the boat, but probably doesn’t do herself any favors by working the crew too hard.
Oki has a deep dark secret that may have something to do with the fact that during a shootout, following a food fight on the ship (Is this a starship or a frat?) she didn’t really bleed. Could’ve been that she just didn’t have time to bleed, but I’m guessing that she’s some kind of no-good stinking machine!
And what about Harlock? Bests me. After his cameo at the beginning, he never makes another appearance, which leads you to ask, “what exactly was Zero doing all this time, if he wasn’t getting shown up by Harlock?” Jeez, didn’t you notice the mention of the food fight?
Actually, it was related to a labor dispute between the lazy machines and the people on board who just happened to delegate all the really hard and crappy jobs to the robots.
After the cafeteria gets mopped up, Zero spends the rest of the time doing everything but going after Harlock including battling a space pirate named Shogun (who had a dastardly secret of his own!) and landing on a planet where one man was still fighting the war between man and machine all by himself, apparently missing the memo about the war ending and stuff.
I understand that Harlock’s name was no where to be found in the title, but that’s his really big picture on the front of the DVD and the back of the box babbled quite a bit about him, so his non-appearance in this was a big disappointment.
If you are a fan of Harlock or Matsumoto’s work, you’ll probably be obligated to pick it up, especially since this is just volume one. Cosmo Warrior Zero was a television series with 13 episodes and the first three DVDs contains four episodes each and the last one contains the wrap up so it may be understandable if the first volume is a bit slow in getting us to Harlock.
The problem though is that the first volume should be intriguing enough to make us want to keep getting future volumes. I can’t say that other than hardcore fans, anyone else would care enough about anything that went on here to even make it through the end of the disc.
The animation is sporadically impressive, but often times you’re just getting close ups of people doing nothing but yakking. Don’t they remember the old saying, “in space, no one wants to hear you yak”?
Also, through the first four episodes, you barely meet any of the crew and no one exhibits much of anything that could be called a personality.
The adventures in these early episodes are obviously a forgettable lot, and you have to think that all the on-board tension shown in episode two could have been dished out over the course of the series instead of taking up one fourth of this disc.
Another big problem is that the DVD presents each episode complete with opening and closing credits and previews of what’s going to happen in the next episode. Nothing like spoiling things for us moments before we actually watch it. It really interrupts the flow of things and you’ll be riding the fast forward button every twenty minutes or so just to get to the next episode.
It’s probably a bit unfair to write this one off yet, since it really is just the opening act of a larger story, so I’ll reserve judgment until I check out the other episodes in this series, but it is an inauspicious start for something that promised much more. I am looking forward to the giant cow that goes on a rampage at the beginning of Volume 2 though. (I guess those previews are worth something after all!)
© 2011 MonsterHunter
