Knights of Sidonia: Love Woven in the Stars

THIS IS A SPOILER-FREE REVIEW "Knights of Sidonia" has always been a special little show in the anime world. The fantastic first season introduced a dark, grim and interesting post-apocalyptic sci-fi world. The story was engaging, and felt a lot like if "Attack on Titan" was set in space. After the second season, the series took a huge pause up until now and decided to end it with a movie titled "Love woven in the stars". This is the final entry in the franchise, so i was eager to get back into this world. Story - 7/10 Well, this series has had an insane amount of wasted potential.The setting was literally perfect for the story they wanted to tell, but this movie runs into the problem that a lot of these kind of shows run into : rushing an ending. A lot of stuff that has been a mystery up to this point gets kind off just glossed over in here. The pacing is incredibly fast, i have never seen a single movie move this quick in it´s storytelling. The events of this movie take place in the span of 6 months (!). This is problematic because this movie has a romantic subplot that definitely needed a bit more time to be fleshed out properly. However, aside from all the negativity, this world still managed to pull me in just as it did in the first two seasons. The whole design of everything, the vibe, the mechs and everything else is exactly what i look for in an anime. The best thing about this show is how it portrayed the space battles. The fights are HUGE and spread over various front lines all over the galaxy. It can be a bit hard to keep up, but i think the movie gives just enough information for you to be able to follow the insane battles that take place. The stakes are bigger than ever before in this franchise and the movie conveys that very well from it´s first moments. I also have to say that although the ending was rushed, i am still glad we even got one. This is definitely not a mainstream show, and for them to even put out another movie after so many years deserves some admiration. I can now safely say that Knights of Sidonia is finally a complete story. Art - 9/10 Well, lets talk about the most obvious thing : this movie is entirely 3D animated. This is what in my opinion turned a lot of people off this show, because CGI has somewhat of a bad reputation in the anime community. However, Knights of Sidonia has always been the one show which i always thought would actually be worse if it was hand drawn. Listen, of course the character models can look a bit off, but the main point of this show is the space battles, and everyone who looks at the animation of this show and thinks it is not perfect for this kind of action has absolutely no idea. The insane angles, the fluid movements, the amazing effects and the sheer speed in which the mechs twirl around each other would be absolutely impossible to recreate with classical animation. This truly is mecha action from another star. The insane feeling of adrenaline and speed the show gives you is in my opinion unparalled in mecha anime. Sound - 9/10 As always with this franchise, a lot of time has gone into the sound effects and you can hear every single beat of it. I highly suggest you watch this movie with headphones or a very good stereo setup to appreciate the immaculate sounddesign. This takes the fights to even higher levels. The music itself also makes a strong return with both new and old tracks thrown into the mix here. Of course the very first opening theme (Which is an absolute banger btw) gets used during one of the most hype scenes and it was just perfect. Characters - 6/10 To be honest, this is the category that hurt this movie the most. The fast pacing and the fact that 70% of this movie is just one insane action scene leads to incredibly underdeveloped characters. Tanikaze, our main hero almost feels like a side-character in this movie because for some reason the movie decided to introduce not one, but 3 completely new characters into the mix and although they are all likeable, it takes the spotlight away from the already established characters. Hoshino, (the best girl of season one!) does not even make an appearance. The only characters that developed in interesting ways were the captain and Kunato. Kunato especially had an insane redemption arc and the final moment between him and Tanikaze was a big nostalgic high point of the movie. The main villain also falls a bit flat to be honest. He needed a lot more development and ended up just being evil for the sake of being evil. I do have to say however that the characters were never the strong point of the franchise but a bit more time for the villain, and a stronger focus on Tanikaze and his romance could have made the movie a true classic. Enjoyment - 8/10 Although this review should have made clear that i am still a massive fan of this franchise, you can´t deny that it could have been so much more and i know for sure that it will probably never get the recognition it deserves. But this show has what many anime don´t have and that is an ending. I recommend "Knights of Sidonia" to everyone who likes "Attack on Titan" , "Darling in the Franxx" as well as "Gunbuster" and to everyone else who wants to see a truly good use of 3D-Animation. -Marco_Yooo FINAL SCORE - 8/10

Short Review: (heavy spoilers) Baseline quality: 7.5/10. Not nearly as magical as Season 1 but still got some strong points. A decent sequel and conclusion to the Sidonia saga, though too little and too late. It wraps up certain arcs and elements in a satisfying way, while leaving fans of the deep sci-fi Nihei is famous for a little disappointed. Imagine the best, most profound Lovecraftian story you have experienced, and it somehow ends with a most conventional fairy-tale ending (where the prince and princess enjoys a happily-ever-after). If you loved Season 1 of Sidonia, skipped S2 and watched this movie finale, you might end upwith that jarring impression. The tragedy and realistic dread in a cruel battlefield are even further weakened here. Challenging sci-fi choices that might doom or warp humanity are presented to the MC, but the dilemma solved itself pretty quickly. All will be good, all will be good. It's like Rapunzel 2010 except the Sidonia version of "Rapunzel" has a sentient tentacle instead of long hair. Oh and that sentient tentacle likes wearing kimono and cuddling with the MC. Romantic? Definitely! Deep? Never mind. (Edit: after giving it some more reflections, I realized another layer of cosmic horror in MC and Tsumugi's marriage: if the love of your life is perfectly replaceable by a copy of her personality in a clone of your ex, what does that say about human nature?) Honestly, I am glad for the MC's final choice and happiness, as I felt for his lost love from Season 1. Following the trend of Season 2, this movie conclusion is even more mainstream than Season 2. One stoic character even becomes a pop star for a while without any sensible reason. If the numbers on MAL are any indicating, the franchise had lost its popularity for good during the 6 years of waiting since S2 (more than 57,000 have rated S2, but only 285 have given this movie a rating). Still, kudos to the production team for finishing the story. Again, it's not a bad movie or bad production, and 3d elements are properly implemented as well. The battles are still gripping if not as white-knuckled as S1. If you are a fan of the Nihei and the previous seasons, I would say still give it a try.

A welcome surprise - the fact that this movie is here at all is a great delight. It looks great while still keeping the style of the original show. The sound mix is very nice, and gives the space battles a sense of impact. This movie resolves the series and provides an ending, which is most important, in my opinion. Now, my praises aside, things are not perfect. There is a 10 year time skip from the end of the second season, however this 10 years appears to have no impact on anyone. There are some new cadets, new machines, but character relationships seem to have stagnated.There seems to be no reason this had to be 10 years later, they could have gotten away with 2 years, probably. What's more, the show had some very interesting character relationships, not the least of which was the Hoshijiro, Izana, Tsumugi, Yuhata love square around Tanikaze. Unfortunately, this is dropped or streamlined immediately and characters just lock themselves into their apparently final pairings. Some of the final pairings seem to come straight out of left field. Several mysteries are dropped or given a quick explanation to resolve them. Certain big things are not really explored, like "what are the Gauna". And the ending feels quite abrupt, when all's said and done. I attributed this to perhaps necessity of fitting everything into a single movie rather than another full season of a show, but as I understand, the manga was this way as well, so I guess it isn't a fault of the movie. Ultimately it does give off the feeling of a writer being tired of his story and just wanting to wrap it up. All in all though, its a fine movie and if you enjoyed the show that came before it, it's a no brainer. Watch it. It's fun.

tl;dr: A film with great space combat mech action but that’s terrible at everything else. This film is the conclusion to Knights of Sidionia. It’s is a continuation of season two, though there’s a pretty major gap between it and season 2. There was a gap in terms of the anime’s release, wherein the second season was in 2015 while this film was released in 2021, but there’s also a gap within the anime itself, wherein this film chronologically starts ten years after the end of season 2. Despite that, this is pretty much a direct continuation to season 2 that doesn’t do anything dramatically different.Hence, it largely still suffers from all the issues of season 2, and even exacerbates them at times. The greatest strength of this series has been the action, and this season is not an exception. When the action is really going it’s excellent. The horror vibes are completely gone at this point, but the fast paced high stakes intensity is still a great spectacle that’s really easy to get into and enjoy. It takes a bit of time to get into the meaty parts as things don’t really get going until the latter half of the film. And the spectacle was a bit extreme at times, with certain scenes being so busy it was somewhat hard to tell what was going on. Still, all in all I was satisfied with the action. The plot I was less satisfied with. It’s essentially just a continuation of the plot threads that season 2 started. I found them somewhat generic, and this film doesn’t really do anything to change that. Things proceed in a pretty predictable manner without really any twists or surprises. There’s also essentially no major world building here either. The Guana for example are left as mysterious as they were at the beginning of the series. In broad strokes I would still say the ending to the plot was fine though. But in terms of characters, things were just awful. The ten year time skip had pretty much no effect on the plot, and seemed to be entirely for the sake of how it was going to handle characters. Or rather for the sake of skipping writing characters and just showing the final result. Primarily in relation to Nagate’s relationships, wherein it the film goes all in on Nagate x Tsumugi and completely ignores the other two that were into him. The previous season didn’t really write them as all that close, and the the writing regarding this season is far from good. Thus everything about the pairing feels incredibly forced, though if you ignore that I suppose it ends well enough. The ending it gives to the other heroines is even more forced to the point of being genuinely absurd. In terms of the rest of the cast, Kunato gets his moment to shine, which did not feel deserved at all. It also did things with various other characters like Kobayashi, Lala, and Ochiai, but it felt pretty half assed and no one was developed well enough for it to matter. The art and animation were noticeably improved, as one should expect from the advancement in technology that occurred over six years as well as the increase in budget due to being a film. The mech action was somewhat improved but it was already solid so it comes out as great. The parts that were centered around humans in previous seasons were pretty bad, but in this film they’re improved quite a bit to the point of being pretty decent. The soundtrack is pretty solid too, though I would still say the soundtrack of the previous seasons was better. The ED is just white text on black as usual for films, and the song was decent.