ne of the most common childhood daydreams involves a stranger suddenly appearing (often just after a parental punishment, whether justified or not), to reveal that the daydreamer is actually a lost prince(ss) and the offending "parents" are just discardable adoptees. One of the most common teenage daydreams involves the ability to simply destroy, on a whim, everyone who's ever wronged the dreamer.
GodMars, a 1982 original video animation freshly returned from the vault, messily blends these archetypal fantasies into a slapdash handful of other roiling childhood reveries--a perfectly sympathetic and empathic twin, a vague but unfalteringly loyal romantic figure, a grand and featureless Evil Force--in the story of Takeru Myojin, a teenage gunnery officer from Earth. Or so he thinks, until he begins to experience strange psychic flashes from Emperor Zule of Gishin, a black-robed, circuit-faced figure who claims he's Takeru's real father and who says he placed Takeru on Earth to destroy it.
In short order, Takeru is fighting a brother he didn't know existed, experiencing the implanted memories of parents he knows nothing about, piloting the inevitable powerful psychic robot he didn't remember, and staring dramatically off into space as terribly significant music crashes around him. The robot, Gaia, holds a bomb that will destroy the Earth if Takeru's brainwaves cease, but it also proves to be a surprisingly effective anti-Zule weapon, despite having supposedly come from Zule himself. The reason why is one of the few things about this movie's muddy plot that does finally come clear.
Incoherent ravings, complete with theme music
GodMars is the second in a series of repriced reprints of early anime The Right Stuf put out this summer. And like its sister release, Toward the Terra, GodMars very clearly shows its age in the simplicity of its animation and scripting. But unlike Terra, GodMars doesn't have much to compensate with, apart from the raw historical relevance of an early OVA that sports all of the genre's iconic emblems in their most basic forms.
Most noticeably, the dialogue is downright painful. Character interaction is mostly limited to screamed phrases like "You killed my father!" and "You've sealed your doom!" The general themes of family devotion and self-sacrifice are big, broad and sloppy, and they're expressed in appropriately big, broad and sloppy ways, often involving explosions and/or weeping. Even a potentially intriguing scene where Takeru first meets his twin, the psychic companion that holds Takeru's only link with his actual past and parents, is played out via a series of crudely animated explosions and shrieked, disjointed information ("If you don't fight, they'll kill us! Our father's name was Eada, our mother was Aida!").
This unnecessary hysteria typifies the entirety of GodMars; virtually everything about the film is out of balance. The story is rushed, but the battle sequences are interminable; the conflicts are unexciting yet wildly overdramatic. Virtually all emotions are expressed to ridiculous excesses, yet the characters still manage to shrug off their own feelings in order to further derange the plot. This movie may be about childhood daydreams, but the execution is more like a complete nightmare.
