Evidently,
the futuristic megalopolis known as Promepolis is a lot like today’s California.
Fires can break out anywhere without warning and the agencies responsible for
fighting them are more apt to fight among themselves. Fortunately,
stout-hearted Galo Thymos never flags in his duties as a member of the elite Burning
Rescue unit. Unfortunately, he is dumb as a post, but he is still the best hope
for saving the Earth in Hiroyuki Imaishi’s Promare, produced by Studio
Trigger, which opens this Friday in New York, following special nationwide
Fathom Events screenings tonight and Thursday.
Initially,
the catastrophic fires were the result of spontaneous combustion brought on by
society’s collective rage. Three decades later, humanity has cooled off
considerably, but we are still plagued by incidents of terrorist-arson
deliberately caused by the fire-wielding “Mad Burnish” mutants. They are
convinced the fire speaks to them and it wants them to unleash it. The thing
is, that turns out to be largely true. In fact, there is much more to the Mad
Burnish outlaws than government propaganda suggests, as Thymos learns when he
is forced to team up with their youthful leader, Lio Fortia, naturally to save
the world. This is an anime film, after all.
Promare
has
a lot of splashy colors and some hard-charging mecha action, but the characters
are mostly broad stock-figures, including Thymos and Fortia. Frankly, there
really isn’t a Burning Rescue team-member or Mad Burnish rebel who you would
really want to spend time with in the real world—and Thymos is probably the
only one most viewers will remember after screening Promare.
One
the other hand, Imaishi does some nifty world-building and he drops some genuinely
game-changing revelations on multiple occasions. This is definitely a film for
fans of mecha-hardware fighting and crashing. Stuff definitely goes boom in
this film—often. Still, it inevitably calls up comparisons to established mecha
franchises, like Evangelion and Mazinger Z, which is probably to
be expected, since character designer Shigeto Koyama is a veteran of the
former.
