Customer Reviews

A Girl Admiring the Sunset

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This series borrows plot lines from Miyazaki's Castle in the Sky: the girl with an all-powerful pendant, a mad-man needing the girl and her pendant to work his flying doomsday fortress, and a boisterous boy flung into the middle of all this because he dared to help the girl. But that's where the comparison ends, for while this movie borrows plot lines from Castle in the Sky, it centers itself on the horrors of war.

Be warned. This is no kid's movie. The film treats without mercy the horrors of child soldiering, rape, murder, genocide, and the madness of war, and though viewing this was tough for me at times, it taught me much about its main subjects.

Though I found the main character Shu downright irritating in the beginning, I still could not fail to connect with him as the film progressed. The only character that I thought was a little flat at times was the mad King Hamdo's do-everything commanding officer, Abelia. But even here, you can still see some of her motivation in the few lines she's allowed to reveal her twisted devotion to King Hamdo.

The dynamics between the boy soldiers and Sara and Shu, is meticulously crafted and very believable. It is agonizing to see how desperately Nabuca hangs on to the lie of going home one day, or how his boyhood friend has become a madman himself. It is in the agony of these relationships that the movie happens.

So while the movie might have taken a plot closely resembling Castle in the Sky, its portrayal of its characters and its careful portrayal of what we read in newspapers but never actually connect to, that makes this series worthwhile, even if it is at times painful.