It’s not like there’s nothing positive to be said about the series. The starfighter squad sometimes works in a vaguely Battlestar Galactica way. By toning down the extreme personalities they provide an opportunity for a more serious look at what life as a combat squad is like. In space. But like so many of their good ideas they just waste it. In fact, I’m going to list all the good (or at least potentially good/interesting) ideas and what they do with them:
Humans have been engineered to survive mainly on photosynthesis.
Used to make Toyosaki’s nonphotosynthetic eating habits stand out. And nothing else.
Dead people are recycled for... nutrients I guess?
Toyosaki’s vaguely scared by the idea.
The ship’s acceleration requires people to hook onto walls or be thrown to their deaths.
We do actually get a pretty cool action scene out of this.
There’s an entire ocean above them.
They use it to go on dates. And nothing else.
There is a third gender now.
Goes absolutely nowhere. Not even a romance really.
It’s not a show devoid of ideas, just one that goes nowhere with them.
The animation is weird and takes a biit of getting used to. It basically looks like a JRPG, with digital characters being manipulated to act out scenes. I suppose it saves them the money they’d have to use to correct these designs digitally, but it does look odd. Characters look identical as part of the efforts at “realism”. Everyone has black hair and a typical anime face. Except the villain and one random girl. Honestly, I can only tell the two main girls (or rather one girl and one third gender) apart by the size of their breasts. It’s that bad.
The plot is typical mech stuff. An evil alien race destroyed Earth and is now chasing the surviving ships. Sidonia is one of those ships and the inhabitants have found a way to kill the enemy using mechs armed with a rare type of metal. The fight scenes are brief and basic. Extreme fight mechanics have been erased. This means that there’s never any real thrill to the battles. Sometimes this approach leads to interesting ideas, like an entire episode spent trapped in space in a powerless mech. More often it just means interminable dialogue that establishes nothing.
I dunno. I wanted to like this but I couldn’t even make it through the first season. It just didn’t have any substance. And without substance and without mindless fun... what’s the point?
