Do not watch this unless you are a fan of this genre!

There's a strange tendency in Japanese animation , it often uses cryptic and vague script to give the illusion of depth. Those who are familiar with animes or games would recognize this outdated pattern, the quirky storytelling would seem to be meaningful as the characters brood over a crisis, yet it barely tells anything relevant to the audience. In some cases it might even alienate the viewers.This is the persisting problem with Harlock. It certainly presents good quality visual as it floats across the light show, but the vague narrative hurts the presentation. The dialogues may sound flamboyant, yet it is actually shallow and superficial. Backstory is glossed over while the interactions are deprived of enjoyment. The characters, even though looking attractive, just can't generate enough interest as they banter with foreign jargon.It even resembles teen drama instead of space voyage at times. Development is often crude, only to give dramatic scenes without substance. The main story follows Yama as he tries to catch the titular Harlock. Both of them are not that audience friendly, they are already in lamentation with barely any introduction. It's hard to relate since they look like generic RPG cast with average mellow issue.Then it becomes heavily convoluted as the movie tries to mix strange terms, they sound ominously impaction like dark matter or ancient race, but material is too thin. After a hefty amount of scenery changes, cool poses and starship fights, the movie can barely hold interest for characters and with relatively long runtime it turns into a plodding endeavor.This is Final Fantasy: The Spirit Within all over again, glossy effect and drab boring story. It will be hard to either garner interest for new audience or please old fans with such lackluster narrative, but at least it works for an eye candy.

I really like Japanese anime and I have come to expect good animation and deeply interesting stories, mixed with some Asian quirks. Harlock has almost none of that. The animation is 3D and even if pretty well done, in the end it is kind of repetitive and lazy. The story is a complete mess, combining classic pirate ideas with space opera kind of battles, only in - again - such a lazy way that it totally annoyed me.Let me give you a taste: there is a space ship that is kind of indestructible and has an immortal captain. It battles the horrible manipulators of the human race which hold the Earth hostage as a possible reward for the faithful, who would be allowed to return. And they have a zillion ships and planet buster weapons, but this pirate captain faces them head on and wins, because... he has an indestructible ship. Every character in there is a bumbling idiot, switching allegiances and going 180 on every decision they made, until you don't get anymore what the movie is about and what the characters are fighting for.Bottom line: a waste of time with nothing to teach except... flowers are pretty, I guess.

It is currently 3:37 am in Boston Massachusetts right now. I took the time out from going to sleep,just to comment on how bad this movie was....So much plot holes!!! The movie started off pretty cool, I was excited for the visuals, it seemed like boy was about to embark on a journey with these pirates and one dimensional characters!... Harlock seemed so cool.Halfway into the movie, it was all about the boy's past and him flipping sides, which he ended up doing like 4 times. His brother has no other emotion but anger, non justified anger I might add. Harlock is insane and the crew still follows him after they learned that they were mislead for all those years. The ending leaves you with a stupid look on your face. I kept wishing that it was going to get better...The plot has ZERO foundation. It holds a theme for twenty minutes at a time. 30M dollar budget for the greatest CGI I've ever seen, horrible story, should've spent some of that money on the script, heck give me six figures and I would've sat in Starbucks all day for a year typing away.Did I mention one-dimensional characters? Sorry, I'm done and off to bed... I feel like I have just finished my civic duty to mankind.