Review: ‘The Sky Crawlers’

Sky Crawlers is an incredibly well animated film with gorgeous CGI aerial dog fights with creatively designed planes. But that’s maybe 5% of a film largely padded out with dialogue that touches on ideas but never fleshes them out. It was confusing, irritating and hard for me to sit through.

The film opens with an incredible and violent dog fight between two opposing forces, with a gorgeous P-51 Mustang inspired plane with a black streaked jaguar painted on the side. It’s a great opening to a film that will leave you ready for action and adventure. Sadly the director Mamoru Oshii (Ghost in the Shell) takes most of the two hour film to talk about characters you never meet and doesn’t explain what’s really going on until well over half way through the film. It’s a definite problem.

The basis for the story is that it takes place in an alternate reality. It’s planet Earth but the continents are shaped differently and the countries as we know them are completely different. Two large corporations are at war and over what isn’t ever explained. Maybe it’s a war based economy and the fact the war exists is what creates jobs. It’s all very vague. The year is somewhere in the 1950s where airplanes still fly under propeller power and classic cars fill the road, but there are computers, flat screen TVs and genetic engineering.

Our hero is Yuichi Kannami. He’s what is called a Kildren. Kildren are genetically engineered people designed to never age past puberty, and meant to fight in aerial combat. All of the pilots are like this and because they’re created they are legally able to be killed without consequence. It’s a very odd idea but hearkens back to the idea of replicants in Blade Runner. He’s stationed at a small air force base with just a few other pilots all of whom seem to have an typical anime air of mystery behind them. Their leader is a Kildren woman named Suito Kusanagi (Kusinagi is also the main character from Ghost in the Shell’s name).

Much of the film involves a lot of montages of time passing on base, airplanes taking off and a few random dog fights and the only real plot to any of this is that there’s an enemy pilot named The Teacher. He’s the one who was flying the plane with the Jaguar painted on it in the opening scene. Rumors fly around about him being this unstoppable pilot and that anyone who goes up against him will get shot down. There’s also a rumor that he’s an adult and not a Kildren like the others. He’s a character shrouded in mystery and if you can manage to stay awake through much of the boring dialogue filling the space between action sequences you’ll actually start to wonder who he is. Kusinagi has a child on base and there’s also a mystery as to who the father is. Is it the pilot Jinroh that Yuichi is replacing? Is it The Teacher? No one knows.

For a film that’s about pilots and dog fighting there’s very little of that, and the one truly epic battle that does happen is over far too quickly. Events just seem to happen in this movie without explanation and there are many characters that really have no place. The worst part of this film though is that everything is explained in literally the last 10 minutes. Ideas come flying out of no where with no build to them at all. I’m not going to give them away, but the story is so back heavy that you’re thrown way off (if you’re even paying attention) and just don’t care.