Set your heart ablaze and burn the world!
Thirty years ago, a new race of flame-wielding mutants called “Burnish” appeared among humanity leaving a trail of death and destruction in their wake and ultimately causing a calamity known as the Great World Blaze.
Presently in the republic of Promepolis, a team of firefighters known as the Burning Rescue is tasked with stopping these horrifying monsters using the most performant technology. Their main enemy is a terrorist group calling themselves The Mad Burnish who has been causing havoc all over the nation.
 |
| Mad Burnish |
Despite their arsons and wanton destruction, the Burnish is not quite the evil fire mutants the public believes them to be. In truth, they are much more moving beneath the surface of Promepolis than meets the eye and a dark conspiracy aims to hide the truth of this group's nature from the whole world from ever knowing who they are.
Characters:
 |
| Galo Thymos |
Galo Thymos is an overly energetic young man and the rescue team's most recent recruit but often the star of the show. He considers Kray Foresight, the governor of Promepolis, his hero for saving his life. He has a penchant for giving out ridiculous names and is led by his burning drive more than reason.
Galo is kindhearted by nature but extremely naïve. While responding to a Mad Burnish attack, Galo successfully defeats their leader, unbeknownst to them both, it would be the catalyst for an unlikely friendship and ultimately leading him to question everything about his beliefs in the government and what he has worked for in his whole life.
 |
| Lio Fotia |
Lio Fotia is the leader of Mad Burnish as such, he is quite possibly the strongest of the Burnish despite his young age. He acts as the leader of the Burnish resistance taking on the role of a terrorist.
Despite most Burnish showing a hot-headed personality, Lio is displayed as a calm, level-headed leader with a simple goal to survive and protect his fellow Burnish brethren from the government of Promepolis. Thus when Lio first met Galo and seeing him to be affiliated with the opposition, this naturally made them reject each other's morals and principles from the start.
Animation and Music:
 |
| Mechanized firefighting suit |
Promare was directed by Hiroyuki Imaishi and co-produced by studio Trigger and XFLAG. Most of us would know studio Trigger to be responsible for works such as "Kill la Kill" and "Little Witch Academia" so it's safe to say this film would definitely pique the interest of many Trigger fans that are looking for some over-the-top mecha action.
The movie’s style of animation feels like a comic book movie, even though it’s supposedly an animated film. It looks as if they somehow digitize the mechas into hand-drawn 3D blocks and blended them well into the environment which created a spectacle fast-paced movement for all the mecha fight scenes (Leave it to studio Trigger for all the flashy goodness as usual).
The film's theme songs feature "Kakusei" and "Kōri ni Tojikomete" performed by "Superfly". Their tone would sound just nice enough to fit in with the fight scenes but beyond that, there isn't much to say about it.
Final Thoughts:
After watching the movie, some of us thought about the film being too self-aware of its flashy troupe. It’s like they knew all the cliches and the cartoon-ness would be made fun off, so they just rolled with it and went all out to see how far they can go with their animation budget. We even thought it was an anime directed by Zack Snyder due to all the fast-camera movement and effortless destruction being shown all over the place throughout the fight scenes.
This could have worked well and the anime could have been one of those 'so-bad-that-it’s-good’ films but due to the poor pacing of the narrative, the story just made it fall flat somewhere in the midpoint (we can kind of know who the villain is by the time it reaches the climax and it ain't even a spoiler if we type it here). About 80% of the movie is just action scenes with a simple conflict of interests that can be resolved by having both characters sit down and talk about their "mother's name" ;)
 |
| Lio v Galo |
The characters are waaaayyy too stereotypical. It isn’t Galo and Lio that we see, it's ‘standard loudmouth anime protagonist’ and his ‘rival/frenemy’ (like NARUTO! and SASUKE!) who have to work together and save the world from the 4th great ninja war (woops, wrong storyline).
But if you're full-on into Shonen drama characters and just want to watch some awesome mecha fights then this is just the right film for you to enjoy. Just make sure to turn off your brain from the storytelling and don't pay too much attention to the plot details (it went from a simple "fire-fighting story with a happy-go-lucky protagonist wanting to be the best like no one ever was" to a "combine our powers to save the world by blowing shit up").
There are good moments, like when Galo comes to accept that the Brunish aren’t the bad guys, and the mechanized suits with the way they transformed are creative, but these moments are far too few for the film to be considered great.
For those reasons, the overall movie gets a rating of 2.5 out of 5. A colorful film with amazing animation and spectacular mecha fight scenes but storytelling and plotwise just cancels out the film's full potential of becoming great.
Written by KittyBoss
0 comments:
Post a Comment