Two Sentence Reviews

Movie reviews, in two sentences, whenever I feel like it.

[twosentencereviews]

Star Trek: Lower Decks: 7/10

Like many a Trek show, it takes a couple seasons to get going, sometimes falls into predictable ruts, and depending on the episode the characters are either deeply compelling or caricatures of themselves. But when it's good, it's great, delivering on the light satire of exploring Starfleet from the bottom up, with animation achieving what would be infeasible in live-action.

[twosentencereviews]

Cloud Atlas: 9/10

(2012 film)

In my opinion, this is one of the Wachowski's finest works, weaving six stories into one metanarrative with truly one-of-a-kind filmmaking, while retaining fearless hope and heart throughout. Reusing its cast of extremely talented actors to represent reincarnation is a fascinating technique...even if it raises thorny questions of its own about the permissibility of race-bending makeup.

[twosentencereviews]

Jacob's Ladder: 7/10

(1990 film)

The horror visuals are very effective, with flashes of "wait what was that" freakiness that make even the audience second-guess their eyes. But it's totally obvious that there's going to be a twist, so you spend the movie waiting for the explanation, and then the explanation given is the most boring one.

[twosentencereviews]

Backrooms: 4/10

(2026 film)

I'm sorry, but a bunch of empty rooms with yellowish wallpaper doesn't scare me, at least not beyond the simple brain-stem adrenaline reaction of the jumpscare. It tries to wrangle some theming around distorted memories and falling into mental ruts, but the fact that the titular backrooms are a demonstrably physical location undermines this.

[twosentencereviews]

Band of Brothers: 10/10

(2001 HBO miniseries)

This is the perfect war film/show; flawless in absolutely every regard, most especially the acting, writing, and battle choreography. The decision to start each episode with short interviews with the actual men in the war is a stroke of artistic genius, because it instantly punctures any disbelief and makes every battle feel so very, very real.

[twosentencereviews]

Trigun: 9/10

(1998 anime)

Between the silly beginning and the angsty ending, there's a damn near perfect space Western for a good stretch in the middle. I did eventually get kind of tired of looking at deserts though.

[twosentencereviews]

The Thin Red Line: 6/10

The things which are emotionally significant to a soldier on a campaign are not necessarily the things which are emotionally significant to an audience member watching a dramatization. This movie desperately needed editing to find a narrative throughline; three hours of unintelligible violence with bad poetry dubbed over it is not interesting.

[twosentencereviews]

Stalker: 6/10

(1979 dir. Tarkovsky)

This film has a lot to say, a lot of complex meditations on belief and desire and fear and greed and more. But even though it gets an astonishing economy of emotional mileage out of dialogue, silence, and shots of overgrown industrial ruins, three full hours where ultimately nothing happens is very hard to stomach.

[twosentencereviews]

Full Metal Panic!: Invisible Victory: 7/10

This season improves the villains somewhat, but at the cost of losing the critical dynamic between the leads due to extended separation. This is the last gasp of a zombie franchise, briefly revived 13 years later (with a new studio and artstyle), but increasingly unlikely to ever reach the light novels' actual proper ending.

[twosentencereviews]

Full Metal Panic!: The Second Raid: 7/10

(2005 anime)

The villains are still terrible, only serving as scenery-chewing distractions. But a shift towards the serious in the second half of this season (starting with the haircut episode) actually works extremely well, raising the stakes and spurring real character development.

[twosentencereviews]

Knights of Sidonia: 5/10

(2014 anime)

I do not care for this 3D animation style; it's flat and inexpressive. Both the alien war and the harem plotline are predictable, repetitive, and thematically empty, but worse, have multiple abandoned plot threads that go nowhere.

[twosentencereviews]

EIGHTY-SIX: an autopsy

So, I'm on a mecha (specifically "real robots" military sci-fi) research binge. This led me to watch EIGHTY-SIX: by the numbers, the fourth highest rated and most viewed mecha show ever.

But I found this show first boring, and then actively repulsive. Which surprised me. I need to dissect why my experience is so vastly different than other people's, identify where there might be blind spots.

Lets start with the basics here. Child soldiers are...bad, right? Like, giving a child a gun and telling them to shoot someone (especially another child) is horrific.

I think there's a defensible claim that all soldier-ing is traumatic to some degree. The practical need for armies to be operationally efficient means that soldiers must be intensely conditioned to obey orders instantly and without question, suppressing their essential human freedom of self-determination. And those orders are often to commit acts of violence against strangers and/or to put oneself in mortal danger. Even the mere act of putting on a uniform means putting a target on your back, as the enemy is now 100% justified in labeling you an "enemy combatant".

An adult can consent to this. They can choose to accept these risks in exchange for a promised benefit or ideological purpose. They go into the dehumanizing bootcamp process knowing its likely and possible consequences, and weighing that against their personal values.

But a child cannot consent. The brain of a teenager is rapidly changing, their sense of self and personal values in a state of constant flux. Teenage experimentation is the "fuck around and find out" stage of human development, where the boundaries of social systems are explored. This makes teens exceptionally vulnerable to coercion. A teen exploring their world that gets put into a situation of "follow orders or die" is going to have that imprinted deep into their psyche, their wiring set up to permanently see the world through a soldiers eyes. This is fucked up.

And you know what? 90% of all mecha anime shows agree (at least in the "real robot" subgenre). While the 16-year-old anime protagonist is as ubiquitous as air, pretty much every mecha show with child soldiers will use that very fact to establish the core conflict.

There are frankly too many examples to go through here, but I'll pick three as reasonably representative samples.

Darling in the FranXX is an explicit dystopia. The ultimate villains of the show are the ones who took away their children's names and future. The "happy ending" is this regime ending.

Iron-Blooded Orphans is a tragedy. The cruelty of child slavery and surgical mutilation is one that Tekkadan are ultimately unable to recover from. The bittersweet ending is Tekkadan dissolving while reforms are made to prevent this harm in the future.

Full Metal Panic is a rom-com, where the central obstacle dividing the lovers is the trauma and emotional damage of the male child soldier lead. The happy ending here is him slowly growing through that trauma to become a "real boy".

I could go on, but I won't. The point here is that in every mech anime, a "happy ending", must, necessarily, involve the child soldiers no longer being child soldiers, finding peace and love instead. Not every show gets a happy ending, of course. But no ending that still leaves teenagers in mortal peril, operating under a dehumanizing military regime, fighting a war that treats them as expendable parts, can be considered happy.

Guess what EIGHTY-SIX does.

At the start, it looks like EIGHTY-SIX is playing a very similar angle to Darling or Orphans. San Magnolia is doing a genocide. It has labeled everyone not in a specific ethnic group a "non-person" and is sending children into a meat grinder of a war with no real plan for victory or survival. This is obviously horrendous.

But then a handful of 86ers get out. They get free. The five survivors of Spearhead get to Giad. And, the adults there react exactly as they should. "Oh my god," they say, "this is horrific, this never should have happened, we're so sorry". Arrangements are made; a happy family, safety and security, and a future of peace. We see the Giadians holding protests, demanding intervention to save the other 86ers, standing against a genocide even on foreign soil.

That is as happy an ending as you're going to get. Is the war over? No. But letting five scared, damaged children heal is a small, real, positive step in the right direction.

And then the show goes "actually these children want to fight. So in fact it would be wrong for them to stop fighting, since they could save lives. So don't pity them, don't try to stop them, let them do what they were trained to do." The actual ending of the show is the five survivors joining back up with Handler One...effectively recreating the scenario from the very start of the show. And this is framed as a joy, happy tears streaming down Milize's face while Shin the stoic "shinigami" gets blushy.

Fuck. That. You cannot start a show with a grimdark, overtly miserable premise, and then try to frame a "full circle" ending as a positive. That's insane, and insulting.

But...people like this show. And I don't think the writers intended their message to be "child soldiers are good and normal". Why am I seeing that message, and other people aren't?

I think it's specifically because I'm deep-diving into mecha. I'm engaging not just with an individual story, but with all of the tropes of of the genre. I fully expect to see a message of "child soldiers are bad, mmkay?", since that's like 75% of the Gundam franchise. And so when I don't see that message, that rings alarm bells.

My amateur critic perspective also means that I remain unmoved by sentimentality in most cases. Sometimes a really excellent show will break through (Macross Frontier gave me the good feels) but my default state is to observe emotional reactions, rather than really living them. EIGHTY-SIX is a show that is sentimental to a fault. I would even call it maudlin at times, mostly focusing on twisting the knife rather than playing out action. If I were just here to try to enjoy the sad vibes, maybe I won't have noticed the theming in the same way.

So, what is the show trying to be about? Did I miss something? On reflection, I think the show's thematic intention is significantly more abstract. The show is trying to be about death; specifically musing on "choosing the manner of your death" though themes of suicide, sacrifice, and euthanasia.

The robot war is not really a war--it's an inevitability. If you fight the Legion, you die; if you don't fight, you die anyway. Humanity has no plan to win, not really, even the "happy ending" just buys some time.

But, death is always inevitable, isn't it? No one lives forever. The only choice we have is to try to change how we die. We can take the easy way out; or we can fight, holding back the tide as long as we can, knowing that we will one day be found lacking and lose. And when we can't go any further, sometimes a "shinigami" with a handgun will see us out.

With that framing, the genocide at the start is still an injustice; but once the Spearhead squad had their eyes opened, they couldn't go back to naive peace any more. The awareness of one's mortality becomes motivating; they're no longer afraid to die. So the "happy ending" is the squad at peace, emotionally if not literally, choosing to live their last moments together and in harmony, instead of alone and in fear.

The problem is that you did also still write a story glorifying child soldiers. Presenting the 16 year old protagonists as "choosing to fight" requires an implicit assertion that a 16-year-old is capable of making that choice, capable of consenting to permanent trauma.

EIGHTY-SIX has other writing problems as well. Milize is the main POV in the first season, but gets entirely written out of the second. She's replaced by a gaki empress who accomplishes nothing and gets increasingly obnoxious over time. There is no real closure for the genocide, as the offending culture just gets wiped out offscreen. Near the end, Shin choosing to hide from Milize was out-of-character and showed the hand of the author trying to engineer a bigger emotional moment later. Fido being killed and then unkilled was stupid. Milize stays friends with the scientist bitch even after her big villain monologue in the first season. Et cetera.

But presenting children as "nobly choosing to fight" instead of "cruelly exploited" is uniquely nauseating. And for that, 86 gets the distinction of being my least favorite mecha show thus far.

[twosentencereviews]

The Furious: 6/10

The choreography on the brawl fights is above average, using chaos to present that one dude could plausibly fight five other dudes at once. This trick doesn't work for the one-on-one fights, though, and the minimalist plot doesn't do anything to hold attention once a fight becomes unconvincing.

[twosentencereviews]

Eighty-Six: 2/10

(2021 anime adaptation)

I was bored by season one, since "doomed soldiers fighting an endless, meaningless war" means there's no actual stakes. But season two actively enrages me, because it frames its traumatized child soldiers choosing to go back into the meat grinder as good and noble, which is deeply abhorrent.

[twosentencereviews]

Iron-Blooded Orphans: 8/10

It's a simple thing done well; the Gundam format of tragic mech heroes in wars over space politics, here wrapped around a likeable "band-of-brothers" core. Orga and Mikazuki are fascinating deuteragonists, and the rest of Tekkadan and Teiwaz are generally fun too, even if the Gjallarhorn antagonists are a bit of a bore.

[twosentencereviews]

How to ruin the ending of your mech show

So, you've successfully started a mech anime. Congratulations! It took a lot of hard work, but now you have a number of fans eagerly awaiting the conclusion.

And now, you want to let them down.

Fear not! There are many ways to disappoint and aggravate fans. Lets look at some noteworthy examples and discuss what we can learn from them.

(Obviously, as this is discussing anime endings, spoilers ahead).

The first option, if you want to play it safe, is the soft landing. Here, the ending doesn't actually need to be bad in any notable way; it simply has to be less compelling than the rest of your show. This may not seem like "ruining" a show, and it largely isn't. However, if your show is presented as a mystery, a significant amount of audience engagement is based on a slow trickle of information. Reaching the end of the road to find nothing of consequence may retroactively taint the experience.

For the soft landing, a good example is Eureka Seven. At the beginning, very little is known about the planet of the show, its governing military force, or the mysterious Eureka's identity and past. But, the main character, Renton, is primarily motivated not by facts of the setting, but rather by his love for Eureka and desire to prove himself worthy to the Gekkostate crew. For most of the show the question of "what is really going on" is not a pressing concern, and can be parceled out in teasing drips.

When all is finally revealed, the reality of the situation (that this is Earth, but there's too many aliens, and if there continue to be too many aliens reality will implode) swallows up the relatable character-driven plot. A valiant effort is made, with Renton and Eureka getting their happily-ever-after, but it is something of a letdown.

The soft landing still requires that the conclusion of the show feels logically connected to its start, just in an underwhelming way. A show which fails to deliver on its core promise instead falls into a new category of bad ending, the off the rails ending. Here, new plot elements are introduced while half-finished character arcs are aborted.

Darling in the FranXX falls into the "off the rails" category. The first 15 or so episodes are about a group of teens going through their sexual awakenings and forming a conga line of unrequited love. The cornerstone of the love polyhedron is Zero Two; a black widow and a monster, who kills anyone who gets close to her for reasons out of her control. The guilt of this leads her to push everyone away, while also desperately craving connection she feels she will never receive. Code 016 "Hiro" is the only one with the empathy, motivation, and endurance to reach out to her. She responds by toying with him, trying to stay aloof to disguise how desperately she needs him. This toxic codependence inadvertently gridlocks the entire squad's romantic interests, as multiple others want to break Zero Two and Hiro up to free up loose ends for each other.

But when Zero Two and Hiro uncover their suppressed childhood memories, Zero Two's decade of trauma and abusive personality vanish in an instant with no lingering traces. With the switch flipped, she's all friendly and smiles with the whole squad, who fully accept her and Hiro's relationship. Since this defangs the plot substantially, the finale upgrades the existing dystopian regime to a galactic hivemind with extremely unclear motivations so there can be a big spaceship fight. This means that the protagonists never actually have to deal with the question of resolving their dystopia in a thematically satisfying way. This creates a situation where the "happy ending" for Hiro and Zero Two is significantly less happy than they were eight episodes prior, making the show feel like it skipped tracks.

Going off the rails is a lurching, staggering way to reach an unexpected ending, but with sufficient time to adapt, it may still be enjoyable to some viewers who like both the old and new storylines. To prevent this, you can reach for a type of ending so infamous, it has its own TV Tropes page: the Gainax Ending, named for Studio Gainax and the ending of Neon Genesis Evangelion.

Most of Evangelion focuses on the emotional struggles of three teenage mech pilots and their caretaker as they bear the emotional responsibility of defending the world against apocalyptic space alien kaiju. This is a simple, effective setup. We know the practical goal: "fight aliens, don't die". We know the emotional goal: acceptance by others, the characters putting themselves at risk against terrifying threats to do so, experiencing anxiety and depression all the while. There is some Christian imagery at play, and a shadowy conspiracy implying more is happening off screen, but generally, the focus is clear and relatable.

And then the last two episodes are a surreal fever dream, taking the moody, decompressed style and completely divorcing it from sanity. This was mostly for budget reasons...but when they got the budget to make End of Evangelion into a feature film, it doesn't get any better. The conspiratorial undercurrent turns into a full-on apocalyptic death cult, and the light Christian imagery becomes a crucified space kaiju causing the Rapture. It is glue-sniffing nonsense, a million miles away from any of the human drama of "I hope my dad will be proud of me if I kill this alien" that anchored the rest of the show.

So a soft landing fills the original promise weakly; an off-the-rails delivers an unrelated outcome, and a Gainax ending explodes violently, granting no closure at all. But there is yet one more option available for bad mech endings. It is the most diabolical yet; the complete inversion, where the original premise is not merely forgotten, but fully denied and warped. When the ending is diametrically opposed to the original premise, you can guarantee that everyone who liked your show enough to make this far will be pissed. This cannot be done too late; the ideal point to start ruining your ending is halfway through, to give both the maximum time to establish trust, and the maximum time to destroy it.

The gold standard here is Aldnoah.Zero. The first season is a masterclass in storytelling. Our emotional anchor is the princess Asseylum, a Martian who loves Earth, despite a looming interplanetary war. When her false-flag assassination is foiled, she needs the protection of the Earthlings. One such Terran, Inaho, is forced to use quick thinking to defend her with inadequate tools against the terrifying Martian mechs trying to kill them both. Their goal is to get Asseylum back into Martian hands safely to end the war. Meanwhile, the princess' loyal guard seeks the same goal, but is unable to act freely for fear of alerting the Martian nobles who ordered the assassination in the first place. It's a tense game of cat-and-mouse-and-cat, with underdog heroes fighting together on opposite sides without knowing it.

So how do you ruin this? First, you put the emotional anchor, the princess, in a coma; not dead (because then you could grieve and move on) but demoted to an object without agency. Second, the underdog hero who used careful plans and strategy to win? Give him a magic robot eyeball and let him win any fight in seconds, so he's never truly pressured or outmatched. Third, the loyal and heroic guard who only cared about protecting his princess? Make him completely abandon all moral sense, and become the architect of the very war she was trying to stop. And finally, instead of having two heroes fighting the same fight from different angles, paint them as bitter nemeses who want nothing more than to destroy each other...despite having barely half a conversation in the entire show. If you liked the first half of the show, it is all but guaranteed you will dislike the second.

A good premise makes a promise to the audience, claiming an emotional payoff will come at the end. If you underdeliver, deliver something different, fail to deliver anything at all, or actively deliver the opposite of what was promised, you will leave your audience with a bad taste in their mouth afterwards.

But a show with a bad start and a bad end is just bad, all the way through. A truly bad ending can only exist when a good ending would have been possible. So write well; write compelling character drama with clear emotional engagement, write action with clear stakes and consequences, write mysteries with pacing and controlled information flow.

Only then will you be able to ruin someone's day so badly they spend an hour writing a ranting essay on Tumblr.

[twosentencereviews]

Darling in the FranXX: 6/10

When it's being a story of awkward teens fumbling through their first sexual experiences, as symbolized by copiloting mechs in a sexless dystopia, it's good. But the writing stumbles hard when it too-quickly resolves Zero Two's baggage, and fully faceplants when the villain ex machina shows up.