X the Movie (1999)
It's a CLAMP joint this time, so you know what that means: beautiful stills, elaborate costumes, and insane melodrama. I really love the dream cross Kotori gets crucified on; she's bound with barbed wire and the cross itself is a jumbled construction of steel girders and electrical wires, something about the series' take on modernism...put that thing on an album cover.
This one's an adaptation of their manga series X, which started publication in 1992 and went on piles of hiatuses before its current, indefinite hold starting in 2003.
We've got our hero Kamui, a guy who's coming back to Tokyo after six years as his mother...rips a sword out of her abdomen to give to him? okay sure there's weirder parental deaths in anime.
Anyways Kamui is unwillingly a destined combatant in the millenium's end conflict between the Dragons of Heaven and the Dragons of Earth, two teams of 7 supernatural people. If the dragons of Earth win, mankind is destroyed and the earth can heal from anthropogenic environmental damage; if the dragons of Heaven win, humanity is not destroyed and uhhh I guess Exxon Mobil lives another day. Pretty standard millenarian mystic sword fights setup but this series is notable for a lot of dream sequences and imagery, I swear like half of it is in dreams. There's an interesting concept here that you'd think Kamui's choice of which side to help matters, but it turns out another person is destined to take the opposite choice of him no matter what he picks. Of course, for angst reasons, this person is a close friend of his.
You may notice that this movie released in 1999 and the manga didn't stop being written until four years later ; There are significant differences between the two. Honestly it's shocking they're as close in plot as they are, clearly the filmmakers got some outline of the overall structure, even if they are missing entire characters and the personalities of others are totally different.
Not actually that great mystical fights in this one I'm sad to say. Somehow the fights end up being pair-annihilations / aiuchi finishes up until our primary antagonist decides to start doing stuff and then he kills most of the rest of the cast. It's very funny that the movie kills off a character who's alive until the (current) end of the manga in its opening 10 minutes.
I did like the Dragon of Earth that's a hacker girl but what did they mean by having her get stabbed and consumed by her apparently sentient and possessive supercomputer
Seemed a bit mean.
High points: the cool set the Dragon of Heaven dream princess chills in
and these two:
I wonder what's up with the protagonist's mom-sword having hebrew inscriptions and a star of david on the pommel. No, there are no answers in the film.
FINAL SCORE: album cover / 10
