#254: First Squad: The Moment of Truth

Half-baked anime war flick a disappointment

This review was originally posted to Twitter on May 22, 2020.

Initial release: May 13, 2009
Director: Yoshiharu Ashino

World War 2. Teenage psychics. Soviet superscience. Nazi occultism. Anime. You’d think this would be a good mix, or at least an interesting one. Sadly, First Squad, a joint Russian/Japanese production, just doesn’t make the grade.

A psychic Russian teenager is the sole survivor of a special unit dealing with supernatural threats to the Soviet Union, and she and her dead friends must stop the Nazis from resurrecting a long-dead, genocidal Crusader.

That’s it.

That’s the whole plot.

What the fuck?

It’s not like Studio 4°C, the Japanese half of the project, is exactly some pissant little animation shack. They’ve done a substantial amount of work, including cutscenes for video games like Catherine, the first Spriggan anime, and the cult scifi anthology classic Memories. And yet, they still curled out this hot mess. First, it’s only an hour long… unless you watch the “long” version which often interrupts the film abruptly with fifteen minutes’ worth of live action documentary footage where war vets ramble on about supposedly mystical events. Take away that stuff and the movie flows a little better, but it’s still one of the most horrendously paced things I’ve ever seen. Things happen too fast for any sort of pathos or character development, almost nothing is really explained adequately, and events almost seem random.

The animation swings wildly between decent and seriously subpar. special credit has to go to a flashback of the main character’s mother. I realize that animation is hard, but holy shit. I can’t even put my finger on why it bothers me. It’s just wrong.

I don’t know. This thing’s a mess. If someone with more talent was writing the script it probably might have worked out better. But that hour-long runtime itself is a bad sign; they should have spent the extra fifteen minutes fleshing out the characters. Instead we get this borderline fever dream that makes no sense and is honestly so stupid you don’t want it to make sense. This is an hour I’m never going to get back.

Go watch Ghost Stories or something, fuck.

-june❤