Venus Senki

This honestly may be my favorite war movie of all time simply because it manages to be both a highly gripping take on war but also very entertaining. You don't have to endure the extremely harsh and frankly dull monotony of death that actually makes up most of war yet you are still shown realistic fates of those thrust into a conflict in a beautifully realized world. Venus Wars excels in showing the individual in war, not just at their most futile but at their most powerful. The climax of the movie had me almost breathless and the ending made was one of the ... most respectful I've seen of it's characters. I hate a story that destroys it's characters at the end, real life is grim enough to waste your time watching entertainment that aims to depress.
But speaking of the futility of war and this movies rejection of such a principle here is a quote from one of my favorite authors and books

“I quite understand how we are driven to lead statistical lives, but I repeat that it is the duty of art to make us imagine the particular; to make us understand that the rights of one human being are not a fraction of the rights of more than one, and at the same time that in any situation of collective evil, the suffering is felt by no more than one person; only one feels the bitter agony of injustice, only one dies”
― Jacques Barzun, The Use and Abuse of Art

Venus Wars embodies this quote in the best way possible and I can't recommend it enough. And don't even get me started on the top notch world-building, I can't think of a better example of a writer practicing show don't tell. You could learn how to write amazing worlds just from watching this film!

「Venus Senki」 proudly describes itself as a war movie with a strongly pronounced anti-war sentiment.
Unfortunately, it doesn't quite understand what that phrase means.

The story is set in the near future on a partially terraformed Venus, a fact that matters for the opening text blurb and never again: the planetary environment, which might as well be vaguely post-apocalyptic Tokyo metropolitan ruins for all the difference it makes, never plays into the story in any meaningful way, and looks just like every other drab exoplanetary landscape of its contemporary sci-fi anime.

The sci-fi elements of this movie are of the hard and grounded variety, to the point ... of being outright primitive; most of what you see is intimately familiar from the mundane reality, with the exception of some vehicles designs, which are for the most part comically impractical and antiquated even by the 1989 standards.

The 1989 standards for production quality of anime movies are outside my area of expertise, but going in without expectations, I was satisfied with the detailed artwork, vivid special effects and animation that is capable of fluidity and a certain old-school grace when it wants to; unfortunately, even though this movie is capable of delivering both impressive vistas and intense action sequences, most of its screen time looks good in an unremarkable way.
The same can be said about the sound, which is used competently and does a good job accompanying the visuals, but is unremarkable otherwise. The soundtrack also contains a couple cheesy 80s pop songs which are used to bolster some of the character-focused scenes and, as I've been told, can be enjoyed on their own merit if you're into those kind of things.
What I didn't particularly enjoy about the sound of this movie is the voice acting: it is satisfactory in a dry, professional way yet largely lacks nuance and therefore prevents the characters from expanding beyond their respective personality cliche, with a couple of notable exceptions.

Unfortunately, neither of the standout characters belong to the main cast, and for the vast majority of this movie you are going to be stuck with a band of 80s action movie tropes and side characters who are largely irrelevant to the plot(compared to the amount of time they occupy) and are written in a realistic enough manner to be outright dull, which would have been fine if those characters were used for something like a coherent commentary on the effect war has on a regular civilian's psyche, but the script stops one step short of even that, which makes for a rather frustrating experience.

But not nearly as frustrating as the script of this movie, which sets up a complex geopolitical plot in the opening minutes only to tear it down immediately with an extremely dumb scene that lacks any authenticity regarding military strategy and the realities of urban warfare; which bluntly narrates how tragically meaningless armed conflicts are, then proceeds to exult in a protracted colorful combat scene straight from some action comedy, which sacrifices basic physics, damaging properties of large-caliber artillery weapons and common sense at large for the sake of spectacle; and which by the end of the movie pretends it was an anti-war human drama all along, and demands an emotional response which is completely unearned.

「Venus Senki」 is an exasperating muddled mess, which I can only recommend watching in good faith if you crave seeing a tank getting taken out by a excavator crane.

Honestly. Nothing special.

Beautiful animation, a lot of gifs from this movie cycle all over anime aesthetic and vintage anime type forums.

But the story is as cliche as it gets. Your basic boring "war is hell" drama cept it can't even get the HELL part right. Hardly anyone dies, zero gore. The protagonist "Hiro" is just a jerk who disagrees with everyone around him all the time no mater what unless the plot absolutely needs him to honour his word or get involved in something stupid.

The plot also doesn't kick in until way too late, and for the dumbest reasons. The protagonist just decides ... to commit terrorism and kill the crew of some random tank because its parked at the race track he used to drive at??????

Multiple key characters never get named. Even once, and yet the movie expects me to care for them? Why. It never gives anyone time to breathe or much motive, Hiro could be cool but we never get into his reasons to be. He's just a rebel jerk who doesn't take no guff from no one not even military officers who could have him killed at a moments notice.

Almost nothing happens action wise is good I guess.
The scenes are very well animated and scored but the action is also highly predictable and full of plot armour that leaves everything feeling floppy with no meaningful sense of danger. Like I said earlier hardly anyone dies, I think a total of three named characters die and one of them only got a single speaking line before he was game ended.

Unless your a really big fan of old school animation, skip this one.