andlock Vol. 1 ended on a suspiciously familiar The Empire Strikes Back moment, with a naive hero confronting her father in his cloud fortress. As in Empire, she's given a horrible revelation, severely outclassed in combat, dropped to seemingly inevitable death, then pulled to safety by a convenient band of friends in a spaceship. A trip to rescue Han Solo seems almost inevitable.
Instead, this second volume of the two-part series follows up (sort of) on the first installment's sketchy plot--evil dictator Zanark has tapped into the mythical "power of the wind" and plans to take over the world if he isn't stopped by a small band of teenagers, which includes his adopted and betrayed daughter Agahali, the soldier who dotes on her, the twin sister who believes in her, the brother who despises her, and a wacky entomologist who's cluttering up the screen for no readily apparent reason.
In theory, it falls to the central character--a young man named Luta, the son of a wind-user priest murdered by Agahali--to vanquish evil by coming to terms with Agahali, learning to use his mysterious hereditary wind powers, and facing Zanark with the rightful and righteous powers of the goddess. In actuality, the story keeps staggering in that direction and stalling on irrelevant character interactions until the goddess herself gets testy and steps in.
Could the goddess have fixed the script, too?
Where the first half of this movie seemed like a collection of common anime cliches made tolerable through visual and textual creativity, the second half seems like a sketchy, poorly edited outline for a larger piece. A great deal of information is glossed over, from the nature of the goddess energies Zanark somehow creates and controls to the nature of the emotional compromise that allows Luta to befriend the woman who killed his father. Minor conversations drag while important moments are rushed; quirky secondary characters with personalities crowd out the story's bland and increasingly uninteresting stars. Virtually every element of this conclusion is either predictable or severely out of balance.
Part of the problem is the source of the conflict itself--a literal fight for the power of an ancient goddess. Given this setup, deus ex machinas are virtually inevitable--but that doesn't make them any more satisfying.
But another major problem is the straightforward, even plodding execution, which is a distinct disappointment after the deft tricks and teases of the story's first half. Director Yasuhiro Matsumura's coy toying with critical scenes and plot elements in Landlock Vol. 1 now seems more obtuse than abstruse, as though he were obscuring critical elements not to heighten tension or carry out an artistic vision but to disguise how poorly thought out they were all along. His sly hints, unfortunately, set up a series of high expectations that this muddled, awkwardly paced wrap-up simply doesn't begin to meet.
