"I'm glad you're alive." © A.I. "Soldiers of the Future" or "Zion: I Want You to Be Here," to translate the original title, is a very strange and, in my opinion, extremely unfortunate anime, which is both curious and unusual to see released from the hands of director Seiji Mizushima. Of course, it should be borne in mind that this project was one of his first, but still, at the time of 2001, Seiji had episodes of “Evangelion” and “King of Shamans”, which means something.
Zion is a short story with a clear distribution of the conflicting parties, but without any familiarity with them. Not really. One side is an a priori evil, which is characterized only by the epithet “a meteorite that fell to Earth”, and the other side is a character with its own design and appearance, but without clear characters or structures of any development of these very characters. Decisions are made, but are made not within the framework of the worldview of the hero, but within the framework of the situation, being detached from all other actions. Lines of interpersonal contacts are present, but they are also fragmentary and mean almost nothing beyond short dialogues.
This format of description could be explained by the general timekeeping of the anime series, which consists of 4 episodes and in total does not last longer than 100-105 minutes. A standard feature film, you could say. And it is. But even in full-length films, the characters unfold better and, in truth, so it should be, because they are the basis of the plot, it depends on them whether the viewer will watch the action further. And here the authors, knowing about a small space for work, still use markers for the development of series, greatly diluting the bits of the story, which somehow try to reveal the characters, third-party themes or even minutes of inactivity.
In the latter, by the way, lies another disadvantage of the anime series - its low-budget. Unbelievably bad CGI graphics, which over the years, of course, only gets worse, extremely inept work with the composition, as well as with the contours and clarity of the movements of the characters. There is a feeling that they do not have integrity, that they are constantly trying not to spread on the floor, and it turns out that they are not very good. It is simply unpleasant to look at, and coupled with the previously described dubious feature is impossible.
In this case, the question arises: “What is more or less done here?” Well, in the second episode there was an extremely good monster, which is a fusion of the bodies of people infected with the virus - to some extent a phantasmagorical sight. It’s also nice to see a tribute to the classic heroes of Japanese television, the series Super Sentai, on the basis of which Power Rangers were invented. These shows to define nothing, except low-budget, but cheerful and even nostalgic thrash personally I can not.
But “Soldier of the Future” can not be defined in any way, except simply thrashing, cheerless and not nostalgic. Very weak and unnecessary work, which is physically difficult to watch today.
P.S. Thank you very much.