Jul 16, 2021
The movie is a much better adaptation than the series. It has excellent storytelling, huge proportions, and one of the best endings of its time. The entire point of the movie is that human actions are ultimately pointless. Keep in mind that I saw the movie before the horrible anime series that was a complete betrayal. The movie is very dark and fatalistic, it is about the future being inevitable and human actions being insufficient to prevent it from coming about. Everyone who is pulled into this cycle of death and destruction in the never ending war between the Dragons of Heaven and the Dragons
...
of Earth is killed, and they are killed simply so that their deaths can have no meaning. The only ones who ever know that some people died to save mankind from the people who died to try ending mankind are the ones who kill each other. For everyone else, life moves on as if nothing happened. All the loss is encapsulated and known only to Kamui. Kamui himself has only two goals, to protect his childhood friend Fuma and his childhood love Kotari. His choice to become a Dragon of Heavens is based on his desire to protect the only two things he cares about, his childhood friend Fuma and his childhood love Kotari and yet this very choice also dooms those two to die. Kamui must kill his best friend in order to protect his best friend. If he refused to kill his best friend then he would doom his best friend to death.
Or looked at another way, Kamui must choose to kill the only two people he cares about in order to protect the billions of people living in the world he doesn't care about. He must lose everything and everyone he has ever known in order for everything to stay the same. In that sense the story is as much about fatalism as it is about a misinterpreted prophecy. The actual eternal war between the Dragons of Heaven and Earth becomes merely the fever dream of a false prophet, a false prophet who sends out people to die simply so that everything can remain the same as it would had they not died. There is no eternal war, just 7 people who kill each other because they believed that a little girl could see the future. And the future she saw was simply them dying. Thus the locations she believes are the lynchpin they need to protect in order to protect Tokyo are actually the places were the two sides will kill each other. The prophecy is self fulfilling, but it wasn't a prophecy about dragons and some eternal war, it was just a prophecy about 14 people dying because of a prophecy about them dying.
The movie has many many levels to it. The tv series is mostly all surface.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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