Final Yamato 720p - (1983 Lang: Japanese, Sub:English)

Final Yamato, giving the Yamato Series (at the time) the big bang ending.



Considering the age of the movie, it being before the advent of computer technology as sophisticated as the software used in the entire Ghost in the Shell series, it was one of those rather outstanding 'my god, they had that little to work with and yet make a piece such as this?!?'. It all starts when the Yamato is again rebuilt (every movie after the first it either gets upgraded or rebuilt entirely) and goes on yet another cruise. This cruise however, brings a new threat. After warping to some unknown part of the galaxy, they find a planet being flooded by a water world of Aquarius. They rescue only a child whom would be later found to be the king's son.

Meanwhile, the king of the Denguil finds out that the homeworld has been flooded by the planet Aquarius (which in real life would freeze in space, but this is the five years of fire, where as one fan fiction put it 'physics took a holiday' during that period)and then plans to use the planet by warping it to Earth to flood it, and (this is me getting into his head here) drain the flood waters and use the preexisting (if not damaged) infrastructure to jump start the new capital of his people... and he doesn't know that his son survived via intervention.

The Denguil are not like the Gamalons that showed up from time to time in the entire series after season one... they are heavy believers of Darwinism, and they are warriors. Now the Yamato's crew, captained by the seemingly revived Okita who apparently was part of some cryogenic tray somewhere on Earth, find out by accidentally warping onto Aquarius, and meeting the spirit of Aquarius who tells them that the planet is basically a Darwin enhancing doom-world.

After this, they go and warn EDF command, which scuffs at the entire idea. But being safe than sorry evacuates the planet Earth anyway. But those fleets are turned back and/or destroyed by Denguil warfleets keeping them boxed in on Earth.

Then the entire EDF fleet goes to war, but due to the superiority of the enemy's battle plans, they couldn't really make a dent (and it didn't help that the entire fleet has been gutted when they attacked the evacuation fleets). It soon falls onto the Yamato to save Earth.

It goes on, making big battles, giant destruction of enemies, till the crew of the Yamato goes into the Denguil Flagship and a standoff ensues. Ending in the King and the prince being killed, and the Earth in jeopardy.

It finally ends in a proper ending of the Yamato (in Real Life the Yamato ended in a suicide mission, and didn't get even close to its target), where the crew except Okita gets off, the Wave Motion Gun is set to do a feedback loop, and rockets off as water cascades onto the planet Earth as well as her decks. It finally ends when the WMG fires, ending the life of Okita and a 'sinking' scene where the Yamato, now split in two, sinks beneath the waves where its encased in ice.

I give this movie a nine out of ten, not because its just awesome but ends the Yamato series till Rebirth with a near-god sized bang.

This film was touted as the final installment in the Yamato saga, a space opera franchise that began in 1974 and had completed ten years. At this point, the Yamato crew had gone through so many adventures in space on the edge of peril that this one comes out as a relatively above-average adventure for them. Bringing back a beloved but long- dead character through some contrived means, only for the said character to give it up for his crew, also sets the story and its drama back somewhat.

However, the film makes up for its problems by being one big space adventure, with the epic action and scale it deserves: glorious space vistas, fantastic planets and spacecraft, and fantastic action sequences, all backed up by incredible animation that still looks great today and grand orchestral music that captures the intense atmosphere of the scenes. Even if the plot is rather average, this film provides a wonderful spectacle to see.

In the end the film marks a grand finale to the original Yamato show; it would later undergo a remake in 2012. The film does the Yamato saga great credit and honor, and it's an enjoyable watch for any fan of Yamato or space operas.

I'll just get this straight out of the way; Final Yamato is a beautiful movie to look and listen to. There's some really pretty animation here and the orchestral score is a major tour de force, particularly the tracks "Aquarius, Planet of Water" and "Symphony of Aquarius". The ending of the film, likewise, is considerably more satisfying than that of "Farewell Space Battleship Yamato" which, after several fake endings, ended the film with a whistle than a bang.

But I'm not here to talk about the good aspects of this film. As pretty as it is, the story is extremely weak and most certainly not enough to carry the film through it's 165 minute runtime - while the rest of the film is at least above mediocre, the terrible beginning and the new villains' rather dodgy plan overshadows the entire movie.

The movie begins with a red galaxy, coming from another dimension, crashing into our own and destroying the Galman-Gamilas and Bolar empires almost completely. Nevermind the questionable cosmology of this event, but it is then completely ignored in favour of an entirely new plot and feels like a rather lame excuse to keep Desslok out of the picture. After this a far too convenient string of lucky coincidences takes place; after escaping the destruction with a random warp, Yamato winds up near a planet being ravaged by Aquarius, a planet made entirely of water, causing floods and what amounts to a near extinction event for it's population - and Yamato manages to save no one else apart from a small boy, at a considerable loss of several of Yamato's own crewmen, too. On the way back home, Yamato is attacked by a new enemy - who just *happen* to be inhabitants of the destroyed planet - for no apparent reason. Meanwhile, other survivors hatch a new plan; they will use a massive space shift device to warp Aquarius to earth to flood it, to eradicate humanity and colonize earth! Wait, what? Meanwhile, Susumu Kodai, who feels his erroneous judgement caused the deaths of so many crew members, resigns, while the earth defense force learns of the villains' plan...somehow; this is never explained either. Nor is how flooding another planet going to help them; if they're just going to wait for the floods to subside, why can't they just wait for it on their own home planet? Okay, so we're implied to that the aliens' entire culture is based on egotism and social Darwinism, but it serves as a rather lame excuse for the stupidity of their plan.

So the EDF decides to launch Yamato anyway to hopefully stop this plan, with a new captain; Juzo Okita, who died in the first series, is brought back to life with some more dodgy retconning, reducing Kodai to being subordinate once again. And the reason for all this is...I've no idea.

You've probably already noticed that I've used the words "weak" and "dodgy" a lot in this review; that is because those words describe the plot of this film remarkably well. As good as the second half of the movie may be, it is not going to fix the horribly flawed premise. "Farewell", despite it's lackluster ending, would have been a much better conclusion to the Yamato saga.