Mamoru Oshii
The Sky Crawlers

THE REVIEW

Every day is the same. Spent in a gray and sterile atmosphere. Any day could be the last, but they don't seem to worry much about it. An attitude motivated by a cold dystopia.

The uchronia of "The Sky Crawlers" resembles a slow and resigned anti-militarist tirade. The slow and detached narration has the same apathetic pace as the characters' stories. Even during sequences that you would expect to be more adrenaline-filled, they are depicted with a cold and melancholic eye, simply capturing a snapshot of a gray and unchanging reality.

Various military corporations (Here two, but it is not given to know how many there are or have been) engage in an air war whose reasons are unknown to us, the personnel who must fight this war are made up of very young pilots who seem to never grow up, they're called "kildren," they do not ask why, or at least not all of them, living an eternal adolescence often finding their lives cut short and frequently cutting others' short.

The war is presented with strongly "Orwellian" traits, indeed it does not affect the people but maintains the balance, it is an illusion of peace, the sacrifice of a few for the good of many, war-spectacle-entertainment-illusion. Mankind has never managed to eliminate war, this is a fact.

The unsettling realities that are the basis of this scenario, not even too hidden, fail to move the ground enough when they emerge, and the results are not visible. There are those who are consumed by remorse, those who don't believe what they come to know, those who ask nothing, those who question their own existence and find themselves at the mercy of such questions. Everyone just accepts.

Here, no hope is found.

Aesthetically, everything is on very high levels, always giving a general overview, knowing the details doesn't matter.