K-SCORE: 32
Director: Kobun Shizuno
Based on: Knights of Sidonia by Tsutomu Nihei
Spoiler Level: Major, but you won't understand it, so go ahead.
“Not one of the meek photosynthesizing genderfluid asexual spacemen even mentioned that one of their close friends was a bear. ”
Well, the gravity shifts on the phallic-shaped starship/planet replacement known as Sidonia make for interesting, if outrageous sci-fi scenes. Otherwise, Knights of Sidonia is broken by its internally inconsistent tentacle core-run doppleganger monsters. Also there’s some atrocious characterization and dialogue that will make you question whether anyone who made it has ever actually spoken with another person in any language. I watch anime every once and a while and think, there must be a cultural barrier here that prevents me from understanding or appreciating this story in all its depth, but then, I think, if the Japanese were to take a random cut of US shows, they’d definitely get a good deal of trash. I can’t abide the thought that the forced insertion of a bipedal, one-handed, talking bear nurse character, in a world that didn’t feature ANY OTHER ANIMALS, was anything but a mistake. It has to be. It doesn’t make any goddamn sense. Not one of the meek photosynthesizing genderfluid asexual spacemen even mentioned that one of their close friends was a bear. Nothing. Just, treated it like your run-of-the-mill Sidonian caretaker for the Garde-pilot adolescents as they learn to use the kabizashi to break through the Guana placenta and destroy the cores of the space-travelling world organisms. It’s disturbing. Almost as disturbing as the notion that the only human beings to have survived the destruction of Earth are all Japanese. Call me a racist? Hey! In their fiction, all white people are dead. So...
