Its very slow to start with the fan-service for the Yamato, which I didn’t like all that much. In the first Star Trek movie they did a similar thing, but there they did some closeups of the Enterprise, showing it off in ways you wouldn’t have seen in the show. But with Yamato I didn’t feel they made effective use of it, it just felt like stuff I’d seen before.
The crew solves basically every problem with the Wave Motion Gun, which is opposite of the show— where they fire it like three (3) times. The crew seems to magically know what the next option is most of the time, which gets a little annoying. You’re in an alien spaceship, how do you know this room is the power core without asking the robot that DOES magically know everything?
Its 2 1⁄2 hours long, which is pretty crazy for anime standards, but it really should’ve been trimmed down. I would’ve rather the time spent making an extra hour be put into making the plot less shakey. I saw online that the reason they made the 2nd TV show was due to a disliking of the ending, but I actually kinda liked it. Overall its really not that great, but its fun to root for the Yamato.
Something interesting I’ve heard about Leiji’s works is that the stories get repeated over and over, which is considered a feature. Story-wise this movie is very similar to the original show, but it does enough new that I don’t feel like I’ve already seen it. I’ll be excited to go through Leiji’s next stories.
INVOKED ESSENTIALISM: https://lateen.org/txt/movie/2026-06-05/