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I watched about 1/3 of this movie and decided to save myself from wasting my time with the other 2/3 of the movie. As I can only comment on the part I saw, one of the main things that set me off from the movie was the poor relationship building from the 2 main characters. The movie starts off at a funeral that briefly shows a slew of heartbroken people and quickly changes to the introduction of our 2 main characters in a library. The female lead is putting a book back on the shelf while the male lead scolds her for putting it in ... the wrong place.

She begins to talk about how diseases were treated back in the day, out of nowhere, and basically just flirts with the male lead from there on out. It seemed like they already knew each other at this point, and I knew from here on out that I wasn't about to get the character development I was looking for and expecting. There was no formal introduction of the characters and it felt like their relationship could've been that of childhood friends.

He was never mean to her and seemed just as unresponsive as the generic emotionless friend present in like 90% of anime. If not for the synopsis, I would've never known he was "deeply detached from the world" and "convinced that nobody has any interest in him". I believe the author was aware of this as well and even dedicated one of the first dialogues (after the main character learned of the other's disease) to revealing this fact to the viewer by making him say it out loud to our main character.

I wasn't shown who the characters were through their actions and behaviors, I was told who they were by the characters themselves. It just seemed like a lazy way to achieve characterization and instead of the author thinking "How can I show the viewer this character is detached?", they took the easy way out and decided "I can just have the character say their detached!"

This kind of thinking set the tone for the whole movie and made for an unbelievably unspectacular end result.

I've enjoyed this series so much, it would be wrong for me not to leave a review. I consider myself a somewhat tough critic of anime, but I truly think this show was for some strange reason misunderstood by some of the anime watching populace here on MAL.

I won't go into too much detail, but the story is about a kid who was a super strong candidate for piloting a mech who fell from grace when it actually came time to try and pilot one for real. He ended up losing his status as one of the top candidates and the show starts off at ... his low point. He later finds a special enigmatic partner who is luckily able to bring him out of the gutter, and make him useful again as a co-pilot of a mech with her.

The main characters in the show are all kids, and I would liken a good portion of the story to a coming-of-age type thing where everyone is trying to figure out their own emotions. Episode to episode they're always facing something new, some type of social relationship problem that must be placed second beyond fighting a klaxosaur (the monsters the mechs were built to fight).

The main point of me writing this review is just so I can ask all you review lurkers to give this show a chance. I promise you, you won't regret it.