Tenchi Muyou! in Love

Maybe rewatching this as an adult was a mistake. I used to love this franchise when I was younger. Seen everything of the classic "Tenchi" stuff excepting GXP multiple times. Even read some of the manga. This movie is just... 'sad' is being kind. The best things that can be said for this is that the soundtrack is very good and the animation quality is still pretty good, even with the anime hair. It looks nice and it's detailed and bright, with that extra polish movies typically get. I also still love the way they animate Ryoko and her abilities. Still my favorite version of teleportation,and I love watching her fight. The plot just doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Every infodump scene is nonsense that couldn't even be classified as junk science and none of the characters do things that make logical sense in any fashion whatsoever. The opening is supposed to be an emergency scene where we preview just how powerful Kain is. But nothing any of the police officers(?) says make sense. They're studying time? Time is passing? Oh no! What will we do when time and space are moving! (Paraphrasing a line one of the characters says) Kain sucks the space station into a black hole. Then... makes it reappear, but severely damaged. Because. Because? Sailor Pluto may be a character I love but jeez this short scene makes even less sense than her character timeline. How did Kain escape? We never know. It doesn't seem like he can get more powerful in his prison cell. Washu at least compensates for this at the end by commenting that he'll probably escape again, so best murder him before that happens cause you know... he kills planets and stuff. But if this 'galactic cannon' exists in the present, prior to Kain escaping, and they clearly are not attempting to reform and eventually release him, and he did all those bad things... why NOT execute him? Are they studying him? When Washu goes into the database for the police they don't seem to have learned anything about him so all this time has passed and studying him hasn't seem to have done anything for them, if that's what they're doing, and he somehow escaped his prison so... maybe just use the cannon on him to be safe? Why would someone even build a cannon that can destroy galaxies? What is the purpose of that? As a way to keep the Jurai in check? And if Kain destroyed the entire Galaxy Police force, where did Washu get the cannon from? Or is that at the university she got kicked out of? Why does a university have a galaxy destroying cannon? So Kain gets powerful enough to escape his prison somehow. Okay. Why... go after Achika? Why go back in time? Did he lose control of his power and get kicked back in time after traveling near Earth for some reason - which was nowhere near his prison cell - and then, well, he's 'attracted' to Jurai energy so he found Achika? It's less silly than thinking he planned this out. He clearly doesn't know who Achika or Yosho are ahead of time. Although it's odd that he'd go after Achika rather than Yosho, considering that Yosho might be stronger. Maybe Yosho really is just that good at hiding himself. I feel like if a sentient supernova, as Washu puts it, were able to break out of an impossible to break out of dimensional prison somehow, probably going to the planet with lots of Jiraians on it would make more sense than traveling to some random planet and then going back to the past. Particularly when there are fewer powerful Jiraians there. In the present you have Yosho, Tenchi, Ayeka, Sasami, and all the equipment from Ayeka and Yosho's ships. In the past you just have Yosho and Achika, and the remnants of past Jiraians who settled there long since. Kain doesn't seem to be out of control of his powers. His time travel was deliberate. So... why? It's not like Achika trapped him originally. Why not travel back and kill the people who imprisoned him in the first place? The A-Team gets told one instruction: DO NOT INTERACT WITH ACHIKA BECAUSE THAT COULD CAUSE A PARADOX! So what do they do? Immediately do their best to interact with and interfere with Achika's life. I mean already the answer to PARADOX is "stalk teenager in the past" so whatever. And why is the random galaxy police officer there? Can the galaxy police travel back in time? Kain should already be in prison in 1970. Why doesn't the dude alert headquarters if he's from that time period? How did he track down Achika? Washu at least has Tenchi to go on for her calculations. What the heck is this officer relying on to track Achika down? For that matter, why isn't the information that officer had available to Washu when Washu looks up the database info about 1/3 of the way through the story? I like watching Ryoko fight, but the dude is literally there just to pass time by telling us information we should have learned earlier. Why doesn't 1970s Yosho know who Ayeka is? He should be able to at least tell that she's from Jurai, at the least. I get it, past him is only in like five seconds of two scenes. Maybe he's just observing to see that nothing goes wrong. Maybe he doesn't know she's his sister. I guess. But... still. Why is Mihoshi a teacher and Kiyone is a janitor? There's no reason for them to pick one over the other, but Kiyone makes better sense as a teacher because she has the sense to figure it out more than Mihoshi does. Sure, Mihoshi could probably still screw up a janitorial position, but how would she pass as a teacher? Her entire time on-screen is devoted to how bad a teacher she is. Hilariously, somehow, in the next film she's shown doing cleaning work. There's no story reason for why Kiyone went with the janitorial position, unless you editorialize that Kiyone hates kids and/or teaching and Mihoshi hates manual labor and/or cleaning? And then there's the climax. Achika and Noboyuki get sucked into this other dimension/alternate timeline(?) Washu found. The A-Team needs to get them out. Interestingly the dub has Tenchi say that he doesn't want to die. The sub doesn't. I get it, the audience should know that, after the whole plot of the film, Tenchi's parents not getting together and having Tenchi means no Tenchi, but it was a bit... odd. Why does Ryoko 'save' him? She's not saving him. There's no way to 'save' him if his parents are sucked into the void with no way to return. So the A-Team needs to get to the parents, even though there's no way to pinpoint their location. Oh, I know! We'll transfer Achika's brainwaves to Tenchi! And Ryoko can lock onto the coordinates of that! ...I really think whoever translated for the sub did a bad job. Like I hope that's what happened. If not, like. What? On the one hand, maybe it's sort of an "Assassin's Creed" genetic memory thing before AC was a thing. Doesn't really explain how pulling on Tenchi's "genetic memory" of his mom would pinpoint her present location unless he's like... looking through her timeline. In which case, she shouldn't 'sense' him. Because he's not connecting with her. He's just looking at events that have already happened in HIS past. Basically the climax is "we can't find the spatial coordinates so let's transform monkeys into apple pies to solve the problem". Hey remember how the series fridged Tenchi's mom? Remember how everything we know about her, from the movie and the various series, makes her sound neat and interesting and powerful and she would sure be an interesting character to see a story about? Remember how this ending basically explains how she got fridged? Skip this. It just... is not worth it. Listen to the soundtrack somewhere else. The dub handles what jokes there are better, because the sub actors have no intonation, but the 'jokes' are also poorly timed and the script is just bad, so whatever.

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