Dominion Tank Police is exactly like Patlabor if it was set a little further in the near future. Uncannily similar. You will find yourself checking the release date of this ova, its manga, and patlabor's first OVA. You will find yourself checking staff listings to try and figure out why they are so extremely similar, down to the female lead being a deadringer identical to Noa Izumi, down to the way she dotes on her tank, down to the relationship of everyone within the Tank Police. But, as far as I can tell, there is no ripping off going on, it's a sheer coincidence. Something was just in the zeitgeist that made people want a mecha otaku girl proving herself in a mechanized police force.
Which frees up Dominion to have its own unique critique, separate from Patlabor, and this is where it all goes wrong. Within Dominion, and by "within" I mean the last 25% of its runtime, are the bones of a good story. It hits on all the Masamune Shirow classic questions: what does it mean to be human, how do you grapple with the fact that "the bad guys" have a lot of people with understandable motives, internal government conspiracies, and megacorporations prioritizing profit over people. Shirow's iconic and elegant mechanical designs grace the show too -- the female lead's tank feels straight out of Metal Slug, and every other vehicle in the show could just as easily been in Ghost in the Shell.
So all of this sounds really good, yeah?
But it's got that classic 80s OVA problem: it's trying to cram the appeal of an entire manga into two hours. Lots of plotlines and characters just disappear after one episode, after lots of buildup as being core characters. There's no breathing room. It's trying to contain all of the moments within the manga and its tonal variations into four episodes. And so it's constantly fighting itself on the tone of a given scene. The finale, frustratingly, undermines a really touching and powerful sequence of scenes by periodically intercutting them with gonzo comedy for some damn reason. And, indeed, the show opens with the bizarre creative decision to open with a political argument, and then be comedy for 60 minutes, and then start trying to be a drama in the last 60. This is just a completely ubiquitous problem in Dominion, I cannot emphasize strongly enough that it undermines every single moment.
And even if you just throw out the drama and try to approach it as a comedy, it just doesn't work. As the opening scrawl points out, the Tank Police are bad people doing harm in a city that desperately needs help. They will happily take the day off from dealing with murders and terrorist attacks to fuck around for twelve hours, often killing many people in the process. This is not Patlabor, this is not SV2 doing some light property damage but ultimately saving the day: this is a group of civil who are so grossly negligent in their basic duties that it's making a bad situation worse. They can't even take the female lead's disappearance seriously. And the comedy tone is undercut by the drama is being there. They just needed to not be woven so closely together.
I want to like Dominion, it FEELS like someone set out to make a What If scenario for Patlabor with an extra 50 years, in fact it reminds me so much of Patlabor: The Early Days that if you haven't seen that and you feel the same way about this show as I do, you should try that next -- it's a more successful version of this. But I really can't. Dominion now writhes in obscurity as being One Of Those Shirow mangas, and as The Hairmetal Catgirls Show.
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