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Kidô keisatsu patorebâ: The Movie 2 (1993)
Great animation; thin story
I just watched this today and I can't say I'm that impressed with this as an overall movie. I should note first I loved the animation and it's really the strongest point of the movie. Scenes are incredibly detailed, facial expressions are well done, cityscapes and vehicles are gorgeous. There are also some really great meditative shots in the movie that really do a excellent job to set the atmosphere. However the story is where this movie starts to fall apart.
First of all this next section will have spoilers; so don't read if you haven't watched this movie. I have never watched the Patlabor anime so perhaps my dislike of the story is because of this but I just found everything that happened in the movie as too thin to be plausible in the storyline. There is a rogue faction in the military that wants to create chaos, and...to do something, because they don't like the peace settled after WW2, and they want to shake stuff up, or something like that. And that's the thing; there was nothing in the movie that made sense with respect to the antagonist's motivations. In fact their motivations are only discussed through philosophical musings similar to high school level views of international relations: the developed world enjoys peace at the expense of the war torn nations or something, so down with the system. It all sounded very juvenile to me.
So after the antagonists initiate a terrorist attack, somehow the government makes the incredibly stupid decision to stick their heads in the sand, pretend that nothing happened, until they can't in which case they blame the military. Then the completely unlikely event of a military coup happens... why? because well they don't like being blamed. What's the military's goal for the coup? It's never said, all that's said is that they think the civilian government is weak and they know there's some nefarious guy involved in the terrorist attacks but they won't go after them for some reason even though he's hanging out in plain sight jamming everyone's communications in the middle of Tokyo harbor. So this leaves our plucky band of heroes to do the job, because they're the only ones in Tokyo that have a moral compass or something like that.
In summary watch this movie for the great animation but don't bother reading into the story too much. There's also some philosophical musings along the way but they don't have much weight to them. Which leaves some good action scenes, and atmospheric shots to enjoy but not a whole lot else.