he invaders call themselves "the Gods." To hear their side of the story, God created humanity to live on Earth, and other beings to inhabit other "territories." When Earthlings started pushing into space, they exceeded their rightful boundaries and became unwelcome invaders -- the equivalent of bacteria entering a human body.
Big Wars never makes it clear whether this is the truth or just a demoralizing piece of alien propaganda. The Gods are certainly experts at subverting and brainwashing humans, getting them to preach this cant and betray the rest of Mankind. But do the Gods believe in their own religion?
Such distinctions don't seem to matter to Captain Kanki Akuh, a stalwart, leaden soldier who shows considerably more passion towards a new ship than an old lover. He's just out to fight and win, whether he's going hand-to-hand against a traitorous officer or leading a suicide mission against the legendary God-ship Hell. As the war for Mars drags on and on, Akuh has to fight for possession of his planet, his species, his mind and the beautiful woman he sometimes has blank-faced, expressionless sex with. Pity he doesn't seem to care more -- about her, himself or anything apart from the conflict nearest to hand.
"Big" doesn't begin to cover it
Big Wars has all the hallmarks of an incomplete chapter in a much larger story -- a hugely sprawling timeline, a cast of characters richer in histories than personalities, even an ending that smacks of "a single battle won, a whole war left to go."
But apart from the unsatisfying abruptness of that ending, this is an unusually rich chapter, replete with grand-scale space opera and small-scale personal horror. The fluid, dizzying battles recall the best effects the Star Wars trilogy had to offer. The colors are rich and lavish; the most mundane backgrounds are packed with sudden surprises. Even the newly added dubbing has been attended to carefully, with a translation that follows Central Park's previous subtitled version almost to the letter, and voices that actually seem appropriate for the characters.
It's therefore a pity that Akuh is such a robotic stuffed shirt. Considering what he endures during the course of the movie, an occasional emotion would have been a reasonable addition to his character -- and it might have helped balance the scales a bit. As it is, Big Wars leaps to life whenever the fighting starts, but it tends to maunder along otherwise, even in the deepest of its many personal moments.
Maybe there's a point being made here about the dehumanizing effects of war -- but without a grain of empathy for Akuh, it's hard to tell whether he's been brutalized by fighting or was just kind of a dumb brute to begin with. If the former, it's sadly ironic that the battles are so much more interesting than the victims they've left behind.
