Based on the manga by Clamp Studios. Released in North America by Manga
Entertainment. Awaited eagerly by many a fan. Beautifully animated, breathtaking,
really. Sadly enough, this movie only scores a "decent" in my books.

There are reasons, obviously. I mean, the animation is beautiful. It really
is. And this is Clamp Studios, we're talking about here. Their animation
has very rarely been subpar. (just so you know, they're the ones behind such
anime classics as Magic Knights Rayearth and the hilarious waste of time,
Miyuki-chan In Wonderland) The style is nice (big-ass eyes, as is what Clamp
is famous for... and we're talking big even for anime), and the animation is
some of the nicest this side of Princess Mononoke.

The story itself is also pretty good. It's nothing to write home about, but
it's good enough to sustain an animated epic if it reached its utmost potential.
Sadly enough, however, the potential of the story is never truly reached.

Here it is in a nutshell: Kamui is a youth who is commanded by his mother to
return to Tokyo. In a disturbing opening sequence she reaches her hand into
her stomach and pulls out a sword. It's disturbing cause as he fingers dig
into her stomach you see blood, and as the sword is pulled out there is blood
and ooze on it. The sword enters into Kamui, and she proceeds to explode.

Ain't nothin' like an exploding naked woman to set a movie to a strnge mood.

Turns out that Kamui (whose name means "Power of God") is the key to armegeddon.
There are two forces fighting for the world, the Dragons of the Earth and the
Dragons of Heaven. The Dragons of Earth want to retake the world for the sake
of the Earth, destroying all humankind in the process. The Dragons of Heaven
want to save mankind. Kamui is the key. He must side with one of these powerful
forces and so decide fate.

I won't reveal any plot twists cause there is... umm... oh, THREE. Yeah, that's
right, a movie with such an epic-sounding story, and there's a maximum of three
twists in the plot, and they're really not all that surprising.

There's more, of course. With each faction there are seven members. The seven
Dragons of Heaven guard seven Power Shields, which shield the world and, if they
are kept standing, are the keys to saving humankind. If a Dragon of Heaven dies,
then their Shield falls. If all seven Power Shields fall, the Dragons of Earth
win, and humankind is doomed.

To top it all off, every single dragon (who is represented as a human being) has
different powers to use. The movie builds it up, too, making us expect some really
kick ass battles as these dragons clash.

And now we come to the many problems of this movie. The first of which is the waste
of potential. I mean, this movie had great, fabulous potential to be a really good
end-of-the-world, sci-fi epic. Battles of epically grand proportions! At least,
that's what you expect. What do you get? Battles which tend to last about one to
three minutes. Sad, really. We're told what these amazing dragons can do, and then
we barely see them do anything. Half of the fights end in suicidal stupidity. "If
you're going down, I'm taking me with you!" tends to be the motto in this movie.
Certainly, in the manga perhaps this made sense. Perhaps having the characters sacrifice
themselves in order to vanquish their foes was made clear in the manga. Maybe we
were shown that they had no other choice, and that it was done in an act of final
desperation.

Not in the movie. In the movie you've barely seen five seconds of the fight before
the self-sacrifice is made and the character is dead. Quite disappointing, really.
More than likely the battles lasted for entire comics, or at least half an issue,
in the manga, but not in this movie. The fights begin, and then they're over. Bing,
bang, boom. Blink and you'll miss it.

Balance is a problem, too. The movie takes its time telling the story, but it speeds
past the fights. There's nothing TOO wrong with this, if not for the fact that the
parts of the story they linger upon are the parts of the story that they've explained
time after time after time after time again. You'll find yourself saying, "Didn't
you already say that two minutes ago, and ten minutes ago before that, and...?"
While this could be acceptable if the story segments introduced something new to the
movie's story and plot line, very rarely is this done. It's just repetition and
re-iteration of what we've heard before, and that's really quite the annoyance. Again,
perhaps in the manga this was used to a better degree, and in a manga there are times
when you have to repeat what has been learned before for people who have just started
reading it. Not in a movie!

There's also not enough character interaction. With a cast of fourteen or so, you
would expect personalities to clash and banter to be rampant, but this just isn't
the case. There is some small bit of banter, but not nearly enough. The characters
are very hard to care about because we barely know anything about them. Special
ablities are built up, but personality and emotional attachment is not. You really
don't care when someone in this movie dies. Certainly, you may think, "Oh, what a
shame," but that's pretty much the extent of it. The only time you'll feel a pang
of emotion or regret is when one of them is killed is a dishonourable fashion.

This movie is not short of blood, either. When people die, it can be quite gory.
From the opening sequence you know this movie is one where they won't shy away from
the graphic death of a lady, and so there are one or two disturbing scenes in this
flick for that reason alone.

The ending itself is lacklustre. What should have been a sword-fight that lasted
five or ten minutes is ended even more quickly than it's started. And the ending
itself (which I shan't give away) is morbidly funny, even though it wasn't meant
to be.

Bottom line? X is a decent movie. The animation raises it up a few notches, but
in no way is it a movie to rant and rave over. Once it's finished, you won't know
what to make of it at first, and then you'll eventually decide upon what you thought.
It took me a day to finally decide upon what I thought of this movie, and I thought
that it the only reason it was worth seeing is that it was anime, and it was in theatres.

I'd see the dub of Project A-Ko if it was released on the big screen... I think.

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