there was an awful lot of saluting

But there was also a cat and a drunkard doctor... Just got two packages in the mail. One was the Bone Orchard CD, A Romance of Ghosts, but the other was a DVD of live action Uchu Senkan Yamato ("Space Battleship Yamato"). Three things I really liked about the movie: As a general rule, there was no attempt to fit both sides of a space battle on the same screen. If other ships were generally visible it was as points of light. Normally you'd see one side firing, and then switch to the other side in time for it to receive the fire. Unless it was almost literally a knife battle in space with one side's fighters trying to ram the others. [This didn't apply to ground combat, which approached the silliness of most FPS.] The bridge and crew quarters had the cramped feel of a working military ship. Although the corridors and flight bay were overly spacious. Meisa Kuroki, who played Yuki Mori/Nova, the Black Tiger fighter ace. Five things I didn't like: The orchestral score was a bit overwhelming at times and rather intrusive. The fact that they squeezed the entire anime series down into one movie, which means that the melodrama which was the core of the series (and what was mostly cut from the Western Star Blazers adaption) was running at fast forward, so it felt that the actors were suffering from severe emotional whiplash. I wonder if it would be intelligable to anyone not familiar with the original anime. And did I mention all the saluting? Seriously, I know the space battles were the least important part of the plot, although they were the most impressive, but I'm sure we could have fitted another ten minutes of them in there if we reduced the number of times that the crew got up from their workstations, stood proudly to attention, and saluted whichever commanding idiot made the last melodramatic oration. Then again, given the theme was one of heroic noble sacrifice for the homeland (much, as was pointed out in the movie, as the original maritime battleship Yamato, set out to do), a certain amount of gratuitous saluting should only be expected. And I'm not sure about the reimagined Gamelis/Gamelons. Much more alien, which has it's good and bad points. However it meant that the Gamalis tech was much more advanced than the human tech (especially in defensive capability), which did mean that the space battles were almost entirely one sided. Which meant that there wasn't enough of them. And there was no Deslock Cannon. And I really would have liked to see more space battles. There is something uplifting about watching fleets of ships being blown apart in the silence of space. As long as they are the enemy's ships, of course.