ThatAnimeSnob

So I watched the second of the Itoh trilogy of movies regarding existentialism. The Empire of Corpses was bad, but could still keep my attention a bit through mindless action scenes and old book references. Harmony fails even at that, since it lacks action and is not even animated as well. You can spot the cgi much easier, while the artwork is blander.

The premise is about a world where pain and suffering have been eradicated thanks to the use of nanotechnology. Anyone taking a medicine stays healthy and happy while also not aging as fast. Unfortunately, teenagers cannot be pleased even with a perfect world, and feel the need to rebel against it, for the sake of rebelling. Our main characters are a bunch of psychotic lesbians who want to see the world burn by committing suicide. And if that sounds completely retarded to you, it can easily be explained with the typical excuse of “they are teenagers, it makes sense not to make sense” that anime are constantly using to cover up for bad characterization.

So the years go by, and only one of them commits suicide, while the other two get a job. There is one the plot considers the protagonist, although the only thing she is doing is being an excuse for providing infodumps every five minutes. There is absolutely no personality to her other than hating the utopia she is living in. And by the way, she is living in an actual utopia, since there is nothing wrong with it.

The only people who are discontent with it are suicidal angsty teenagers. Everybody else has a perfectly happy life. So, why do these psychotic lesbians hate this fine society? Because everyone is equally happy and thus everything is the same. It’s basically “nobody understands me, I’m so different, adults are stupid.”

By the way, that’s completely hypocritical when they all have eye scouters which show numerical statistics for every individual, and they are clearly never the same. Your complaints are bullshit. Even your job is bullshit. How did you become an investigator when you are so mentally unstable and everybody has access to your statistics? Why don’t they fire you for constantly getting drunk and not following orders?

Anyways, the conflict of the movie is about some angsty asshole brainwashing people into committing suicide. Not because they want to, not because they hate their society, but because he takes control of their minds. No actual reason, and get ready for a lot of edgy scenes, full of gore for the sake of gore. This asshole goes as far as demanding every person on earth to kill someone within a week, or be forced into suicide. Which causes worldwide chaos, as everyone gets crazy and kills everything on sight. Woah, this is so mature…

Turns out the one causing all that is the lesbian who was supposed to be dead, because reasons. She has the supernatural ability to control peoples’ minds, because reasons. And she did everything for the sake of a surprise attack on the eternal. Whatever, you bitch, you killed half the population of earth. She even tries to further justify this genocide by saying she was raped as a child, and everyone must feel her pain. Something which did not happen in the utopia, but in a barbaric place outside of it. So basically, she destroyed a perfectly fine society, for something that happened to her not because of that society. She is even goes as far as saying she did it all out of love. She killed half the planet and her best friend because she loved them.

And then the movie ends by the plot device that is the protagonist simply shooting the psychotic lesbian. There was no battle, no chase, no resistance at all. She just sat there, waiting to be shot after infodumping her bullshit for half an hour. What an amazing showdown. There is not even any epilogue. We don’t see the after effects of this disaster, aka what the survivors did after it was over, or how the society changed because of it. We only get sceneries of nature with sad music. The author didn’t give a fuck about people, he only cared to say his bullshit philosophy and wrapping everything up.

This is the cardinal sin of most sci-fi. They treat characters as mouthpieces, and kill them off as soon as they served their purpose. There is nobody to care for in the whole movie. Half the population of earth gets slaughtered in a completely hollow way, and the only thing the author focuses on is spewing existential dribble and showing us trees and lakes.

There isn’t even a sense of plot. The protagonist is constantly moving around the world, not because she follows clues but because she is told to go somewhere for the sake of infodumps. She could have spent the whole movie talking over her phone and it wouldn’t make a difference. Traveling doesn’t mean anything, it’s just pretty colors in the background. The setting doesn’t matter, nor its people, because they are just excuses for existential dribble, which will bore the hell out of everyone within a few minutes. Final verdict, Itoh is a terrible storyteller.