Dominion

Pretty decent short ova. Lots of action and some comedy. On the whole I enjoyed the series pretty much, good to have shorter series to watch that arent 200+ eps marathons. Since it is an ova there isnt much character development and we barely get to know who they are. Although they are mostly stereotypes so it doesn't matter that much. For the age of the anime, the animation and sounds are decent enough to watch without any complaints. It made me laugh at some parts, wich is enough for me to recommend the series to anyone.

Funny...A Little Confusing in places.....Loving the 80's 'Streets-Of-Ragey' Music over the battle scenes......Every Character has something to bring.......Very Silly at times but the better for it.

Dominion is a bit of an outlier. Usually, action anime (or any anime under 12 episodes) likes to get to the point, establish a general story and aesthetic, have a bunch of firefights, and then resolve the conflict, but Dominion decided to do the very opposite. The story is told from the perspective of the Tank Police, whose name is rather self explanatory, they do regular police things (bureaucracy and homicide), but they have tanks. As for the tanks themselves, I can’t say I’m a fan of the design, I’m not sure what science fiction mumbojumbo they came up with to explain why they look likethat, but these tanks look more like inflatable dummy tanks than actual tanks. Another major issue is that these tanks are almost never used, you see them plenty, but for the most part it’s just decorative scenery that doesn’t get properly implemented. Of all the combat encounters in Dominion, only a fraction actually utilised the tanks. Sometimes that’s because it’s in a particular time and place in which there are no tanks, but more often than not it seems the Tank Police use their tanks as regular patrol cars, and seem to completely forget that they have big guns on them they should probably be using. In fact, the main character, Leona, has a customised tank, which usually coincides with being a lot better than all the other tanks, but it’s not really, it never saves the day, the police probably would have gotten more done if they stopped using tanks, and just started carrying rocket launchers in their patrol cars. For a unit with a psychotic squad leader who likes to blow everything up, they are remarkably patient with when they decide to actually open fire. Secondarily, for such a short series, the plot is needlessly convoluted, for a four episode series, just one macguffin would have gotten the job done, a central figure in this story is Greenpeace (a person, not the organisation), who isn’t mentioned by name until the last episode, and isn’t actually seen until it’s about 5 minutes from ending. When it comes down to it, a more effective story would be showing the sort of crime that actually lead to the formation of the Tank Police, having a criminal organisation commit bank robberies and drug trafficking and the like would make the most sense to me, but instead they’re stealing things for some shadow government who have been engaging in a several hundred year conspiracy. They say at one point that in this city there’s an emergency every 36 seconds, but we never see it, the only people who commit crimes are this one fat bloke and his two catgirls, and I have no reason to believe that there’s anyone else engaging in criminal enterprise. There is more concrete detail about ecological damage than there is about crime, which is a bit backwards for a show about police. But, it’s not irredeemable, the firefights, though lacking majorly in tanks, are certainly enjoyable, the fighting’s well orchestrated and there’s definitely a good sense of scale, it’s hard to be that disinterested when you’ve got buildings collapsing and that, and also it’s the 80s so the soundtrack is peak as. Dominion certainly isn’t bad, but it could be a lot better, and they could start by designing tanks that don’t look pure gobshite.

Dominion is an extremely strange anime. Masamune Shirow has many ideas and many things to say. Anybody who knows more than the superficial about him knows that he's hard to neatly categorise as an author. Ghost in the Shell is a thought-provoking milestone in the medium coming from that mind and although Dominion is also thought-provoking, it is so in a much meta-textual way. I will presently attempt to articulate why. From the very second it starts, Dominion appears to present itself as biting commentary on police brutality and excess. The first minutes are spent hearing (voice-off) a heated discussion between a police chief and themayor of that city. As the mayor struggles to keep her composture and argue rationally about the necessity for the police to minimise civilian casualties stemming from police misuse of extreme force (via military tanks deployed in the streets), the chief uses screaming, bombastic arguments and logical fallacies to argue for the necessity of even more force than that, less oversight and, of course, more funding. You could have easily think that this was a very facile caricature of American law enforcement following certain events in the mid-2010s but this story was written in the mid 80s, which in itself is both remarkably prescient and quite depressing. If you thought that this was setting the stage for a grim analogy on the corruption observed and expected in law enforcement, you may be surprised to find out it's not the case as they are the protagonists of the series. Although the series does parody (to a rather great comedic effect) the police forces' ineptitude, cruelty, and proneness to violence and excess, nowhere besides that intro dialogue and a blink-and-you-miss-it part near the end are those traits condemned, let alone met with consequences. Even the sympathetic rookie that we could have expected to become a motor for change, or at the very least a permanently horrified straight-woman, does little else than pushing against the (also expected) prevalent sexism in the institution, before being widely embraced by it when she proved she could be as bad or even worse as the lot of them. I was constantly puzzled trying to figure out what was Shirow trying to say with this piece. Does he ultimately agree with the police stance that the necessity for their existence justifies their excesses no matter how bad? Or did he simply choose, for some reason, a complex real life issue as the backdrop for his sci-fi comedy featuring a gang of irredeemable fuck-ups? Then you have to add to this a rather significant amount of the runtime (for its scant 4 episodes) spent in intriguing worldbuilding (that sort of goes nowhere) or almost a whole episode worth of delving into the main antagonist's backstory for a dramatic and gripping commentary on the inhuman lenghts to which humans can go in the name of scientific progress as way to understand their own existence. Having said that, by the end, the story is expertly told and wrapped up satisfactorily. In short, it is a good watch but one that might leave more questions in your mind than answers were received. And, I posit, maybe that's not a bad thing.

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