Terra e...

If there is one issue with Terra e, it is ambivalence. It’s got a bunch of different narrative concepts, but none of them are really addressed in any significant amount of detail. It’s a classic adage that the best way to please nobody is to try and please everybody, but they were only really trying to please 2 or 3 people, at most, they just didn’t do a particularly good job of it.

To start off with, the general premise and setting, probably one of its strengths, centred around people evacuating Earth due to environmental damage, with only a few elites allowed to stay. The best ... part of Terra e is its visual design, although it’s a 70s/80s sci-fi anime, aka the period when visual design was at its best, but despite the film's other issues, which I’ll get to in a bit, they really didn’t slack off when it came to making some evocative and interesting looking environments. As a furtherance of that, the general dystopic setting looks interesting, not the best I’ve seen, matter of fact it’s probably the least violent dystopia I’ve seen, they talk a lot about “the system” and its problems, but you don’t see any cops enforcing that system, the surveillance isn’t even as bad as it is in an airport. But, I can see why not, they don’t need any cops, not when the two main characters are the only people who are even so much as mildly critical of the system, it’s true that in any social system most people will just go along with it, but there isn’t one person who even is at all critical of it, and since there’s nobody in place to beat them down and make sure they don’t, it kind of makes the characters feel empty, more on that later.

The first problem is the story’s not really sure what it’s trying to be, and once you try and consider the finer details, that’s when it becomes apparent that you’re alone in trying to think about that, the story’s pretty much just making itself up as it goes along. The main conflict revolves around the Mu, people with supernatural powers who are hunted by human society, and introducing supernatural elements into a story usually just becomes a rationale for the writers to stop bothering to care or try, Ghostbusters was good, Groundhog Day was good, that’s about it, so I guess the supernatural genre needs Bill Murray in it to actually be worthwhile. We’re told that the Mu gain their powers from some other sensory condition (e.g. blindness or deafness), with the main character being the singular exception, but once he’s extracted from human society to their spaceship, it basically ceases to be – he’s escorted there by someone who’s mute and has to communicate via telepathy, when he arrives someone shows that he’s got a prosthetic arm, and that’s pretty much it, later on the main character becomes both blind and deaf due to an accident, but it hardly changes his behaviour, there is no actual evidence of frailness in the manner in which he carries himself, he doesn’t even look different, they could’ve at least put burn marks on his eyes or something.

The next issue is that the whole story is so reliant on the two main characters, the aforementioned bloke who has powers and escapes to the Mu, and an android (the only android ever built, as far as we’re told), who’s a commander in the Earth's military, who is sympathetic towards the Mu. That’s the entire character list for all intents and purposes, you’ve got a bunch of other people, some who even engage in action (i.e. people who do stuff), but they aren’t characters, they are basically NPCs. Having a small amount of characters isn’t a bad thing by any means, just ask Eugene Ionesco, but these NPCs just get in the way of telling an interesting story through the central conflict with the two ‘real’ characters, who, after speaking once for about a minute in the opening, don’t even see each other, much less engage in direct conflict, until the film’s final act, which features an action scene, the only one in the film, as if they threw it in at the last minute because they ran out of ideas.

Ultimately, Terra e is something that just kind of bungles everything it does. While the atmosphere is not particularly impressive, it looks good, but it’s got an array of characters you don’t care about, and not enough time spent with the few characters you do care about, an issue exasperated by the fact the plot seems completely thoughtless, it’s got far too many inconsistencies and oversights to be engaging, and while it’s good in places, there isn’t enough substantial content to make it legitimately worthwhile.