ANI-MOVIES, *Garaga

Not based on any existing material, Hyper Psychic Geo Garaga(what a title!)was a 1989 movie that was still in the thralls of the "psychics and cyborgs" craze that Akira nearly finished off from that period. It was released in 2001 initially through Central Park Media under the more simplified titled of Garaga which might have been a little too generic for the anime hungry market that ravaged the rising otaku market which flooded the beginning of the 21st Century. Going into it, your average watcher might think Garaga is just another space romp with weird aliens, but as the film goes on you realize that they tried to get way too ambitious with the script for a full-length feature which might have worked better as an OVA series. The writers kept throwing in character backstories, sudden but inevitable betrayals, secret identities, hidden civilizations, and a robot revolution that gets tagged on in the final act.

Set sometime in the 2200s, Earthlings have utilized faster than light travel due to wormholes. One of these excursions is a standard transporter taking a pair of cryogenically frozen passengers. The starship called Xebec was also the name of a now defunct Japanese animation studio, hard to know if there's any relationship between the studio and the fictional ship. The ship is sabotaged and crashes on a jungle planet known as Garaga where the survivors are attacked by gorilla men that were augmented by an invading Earth military installation. The Xebec crew are revealed to all be government operatives who are on their own missions with the clueless captain being the only one not in it. The rest of the movie is just a endless unravelling of secrets, hidden plots, and conspiracies with various factions trying to take advantage of a tribe of espers on the savage world. The dumbest plot dump is an android hoping to begin a cybernetic uprising against all the human, psychic, and ape mutants forces. With all this going on, it boils down to a rogue robot agent planning to destroy Garaga with an orbiting satellite that laser down the entire population from the planet's surface.

Garaga has no real point to it with zero coherency when it comes to figuring out who the real enemy is as there is nothing but one horrible protagonist after the other. This started out as a reasonable sci-fi idea with a spaceship crew getting stranded on a hostile world, but bad decision making made it have more turncoats than the mind can comfortably keep up with. It is a bewildering experience trying to comprehend all the characters' motivations and what they're all fighting for when each of them is secretly being manipulated by a rogue Terminator rip-off. With a terrible dub and lackluster score, even hardcore fans of the Alien movies will yawn at this wannabe space marine saga.