To (2009) Reviews

• Halfway good

  shinsrevenge2011-08-27

  TO is a strange movie. The CGI of most stuff is well made - as far as space ships and planets go -, but the Faces seem to have another quality and don't fit the bodies. Their Fingers look like they were made of some kind of plastic. The acting is very weird, at least for me. They fidget around and have odd lines. I remember to have seen this kind of behavior in games like Final Fantasy 8, so I guess it's just the Japanese nature, which seems so unfamiliar. The first episode revolves around a female captain, coming back from a 15-years-journey. By that point, she seems to have slept with everyone of her crew - regularly. There are some kind of space terrorists, who attack the station. Those intruders were all rather bad shooter. They sometimes manage to even miss a whole spacecraft. Maybe it's "important" for generic villains trying take over a space station to suck at shooting. She can kill most of them with the help of her friends. Before she leaves to her next journey again, it is revealed that she's actually the old man's mother. It doesn't hinder her to give him a kiss while holding him like a lover. But then again, she's been a slut for at least 45 years by then. The second episode was more to my liking. Their lines were better and the acting seemed to improve. Even the story was more interesting. It tells the story of two colonies, trying to establish themselves on a foreign planet. They soon start to battle against each other - much like an episode of "Outer Limits". But their efforts are brought to an end by the infestation of an alien, symbiotic spore. The end is somewhat predictable, but I won't spoil it. TO tried to combine CGI with simple anime quality, using both of them. It doesn't work out too well, since they are both quite different styles. As stated before, the first episode wasn't that great. But the second one was good, so I'll give TO 7 stars.

• As good as bad

  thimage2012-02-25

  To is a typical example of Japanese storytelling. The graphics are very good although some getting used to is necessary to accept tech realism blended together with manga characters. But the overall effect is really worth checking out. On the other hand, the emphasis is on space romanticism more than any attempt at in depth-characterization (characters are actually very shallow). But To's main sin is that it shows utter ignorance of biological science, military and political protocols, strategy and tactics. Things fall into place predictably, naively and way too conveniently to fit the screenplay. This demonstrates once again that complex SF contexts DEMAND expert consultancy and topic research. It's not enough today to just design sexy tech lines for starships and personal armor. You need to also make them evolve in a coherent an intelligent continuum. For that, there is nothing like getting input from knowledgeable people. Today, this is so easy to do that the sin of not doing it is almost self-destructing. I don't want to minimize To's intent at storytelling. We need this kind of efforts, but we also need to mature the perspective and background. We need to produce what Hal Clement's meant when he mentioned an invisible book that comes with every good story. The one that gathers all the research and understanding of a particular topic. Only then will the romance of space exploration meet hardcore science halfway. Only then may we actually get there instead of just dreaming about it.