CLUSTER EDGE
a review by Badinguet
a review by Badinguet
Overall, a bad show that isn’t worth anybody’s time. It doesn’t even manage to be interestingly bad: for the most part it’s just dull and unengaging. But there’s a few features that are maybe worth describing in a bit more detail.
It has a really distinctive ambience which is difficult to describe exactly. There’s an amiable, almost childlike naiveté to it. It’s never mean-spirited or offensive. There’s never any sense of danger or menace. There’s almost no fan service, in either the narrow or broad sense of the term. It rolls along good-naturedly, clearly very enthused by the story it’s telling. Irony isn’t a word in the writers’ vocabulary: the story is ridiculous, often to the point of outright stupidity, but it’s told with complete seriousness.
The setting, in short, is this vaguely fantasy, vaguely 1930s environment. It’s a few years after a big war where both sides used “artificial solders” as tools to do the fighting for them. Peace has now broken out, and artificial soldiers are banned – but a few of them are still alive and causing trouble. The evil government wants to track down the remaining artificial soldiers for its own nefarious purposes. Meanwhile, our mysterious hero Agate (there’s a minerals/metals theme to the names) arrives at the elite, elitist Cluster Academy and touches the hearts of the uptight Beryl (blonde) and wimpy Fon (also blonde). Meanwhile, several other characters are coming to terms with the death of the saint-like Chalce, who had been campaigning for civil rights for artificial soldiers. Meanwhile, the enigmatic Chrosite (a fun early role for Kamiya Hiroshi) is plotting to overthrow the government, although we don’t find this out until the last few episodes.
So there’s a lot going on, and a massive problem is how unfocused the show is. Initially, the plot seems to be centred around the Agate/Beryl/Fon relationship, but the latter two get forgotten about as the show switches focus to the artificial soldier characters. This segment of the story is filled with digressions where we learn something about Chalce and his personal relationships. In the last few episodes Beryl re-emerges as the centre of a fairly new plotline where
Tied to this is a complete lack of motivation and urgency. It’s never really made clear why anybody wants to do anything, or what the personal stakes are for anybody. Agate is written particularly badly in this regard. He’s given no interiority whatsoever, so he never progresses beyond his handful of external attributes: he’s energetic, happy-go-lucky and improbably good at everything. The revelation of his true nature only comes in the final few episodes, and so for most of the show –particularly the earlier episodes— you just see him drifting around being mysteriously talented and solving people’s problems in unlikely ways. In hindsight, his opaqueness and hyper-competence was meant to have been a “hook” – what’s his deal, and why is he so good at everything? Well, keep watching to find out. But, crucially, the show never presents him in a way that arouses curiosity. You just assume his flatness and the improbability of his feats are consequences of the bad writing and vaguely-defined setting, and it’s only later you realise you were meant to have found them intriguing
The very wide lens, and the constant range of plot movements, means that nobody is given much room to develop or appear in relatable situations. Agate has already been mentioned, but the rest of the cast also remains two-dimensional throughout. There’s isolated pockets of growth and depth here and there – Beryl learns to loosen up a bit, Fon gains some self-confidence—but in general the characters are superficial all the way through it. A big arc is supposed to be how the artificial soldiers, especially their leader Chrome, learn to get in touch with their humanity from interacting with the humans: but they’re already a good-natured, bantering bunch of friends when we first meet them. There’s no sense of them having travelled any distance by the end of the show. Vesuvia, the main villain, also suffers particularly from the lack of characterisation: he’s given nothing to do beyond being the antagonist for unspecified reasons.
To the show’s (partial) credit, it doesn’t club you over the head with world-building and to-camera exposition like many shows do. But it takes this too far in the other direction. You’re well into the second half before you understand the various factions and their goals, to the extent that they can be understood. This renders the early episodes often incomprehensible: things are happening on-screen, but their significance is frequently impossible to determine. The setting remains weakly developed all the way through, which becomes a problem in the final episodes where a dramatic battle between all the factions takes place. By this late stage the story’s fictional world has still barely been built, and so there’s no sense of anything being at stake, or what the consequences of the various possible outcomes will be.
A theme which dips in and out of focus is the human characters’ prejudice towards the artificial soldiers. This is painted explicitly as a civil-rights kind of issue: we see the more enlightened humans campaigning politically for equal treatment of the artificial soldiers, and some points are unsubtly made about how discrimination is bad and people (whether natural humans or clones) should look past their superficial differences and learn to get along. Like a lot of the show this is all treated with complete seriousness and sincerity, but it never engages with the topic in any depth.
There’s also a sporadic flirtation with religious imagery. On three different occasions, good-guy characters are betrayed to the villains for money. Spiritual redemption through flying in aircraft is an occasional motif. The artificial soldiers are being produced by a sect-like organisation of unclear details, prompting some philosophising on the nature of God and “creation” in the Biblical sense. Finally, we discover that
The use of aircraft is a curious element. Aircraft feature very prominently in the early episodes, and we find out early on that the evil government has banned all aircraft except its own military ones. The good guys secretly have one of their own, however, which naturally builds tension for some kind of aerial confrontation between the two sides. This never happens, however. The aircraft plotline fades out for most of the show, only reappearing towards the end. There’s a competitive aircraft race between Cluster Academy and the military academy – the military seemingly having become somewhat relaxed about their prohibition on private aircraft. Cluster Academy improbably wins, but literally seconds later this is forgotten about as another plotline jumps back in to take centre stage (a fight between the artificial soldiers and the villains begins just as the Cluster Academy characters are congratulating each other).
On the more technical side, the style and animation are functional without ever distinguishing themselves. Outside of some vehicle and explosion scenes it never really comes to life. Clearly particular attention was paid to the vehicles: lots of inter-war-looking cars and military vehicles, and some fantasy-style planes. The background music is fun, very synthy. The Ops and Eds have a nice lively mood which fits the show well.
The early-middle part of the show makes extensive use of flashbacks. There’s two recap episodes in the first half, and several other episodes consist heavily of scenes from previous episodes. Interestingly, the reliance on flashbacks decreases sharply as the show progresses.
Finally, this would be incomplete if I didn’t say a few words about the homolust (or the lack of it). The cast is almost exclusively pretty boys. Despite a promising start nothing ever really gets off the ground – Agate and Beryl are set up as this stereotypical fun guy x uptight guy combination, but they send up spending most of the show apart so things don’t have any room to go anywhere. Agate later has a cute friendship with Chrome that, again, gets set aside after a few episodes.
Overall, therefore, not a good show from any perspective, and one that’s been deservedly forgotten.
Miscellaneous observations
In a show filled with improbable events, a particularly improbable event comes early on: Fon's plane is about to explode and crash into a lake, but Agate saves him by doing a sick jump on his motorbike, leaping an enormous length off the bike onto the plane, grabbing Fon and jumping a safe distance away from the plane before it explodes. This scene is then flashed back to three times in the next half-dozen episodes.
Much later on, we have a scene where the students of Cluster Academy discover (to their horror) that Chrome is an artificial soldier. Despite this taking place indoors, the students somehow possess a ludicrous profusion of stones to pelt him with.
This show, like many others with a vaguely old-timey setting, lets you know certain characters are poor because they wear cloth caps and waistcoats, have mustaches, etc.
10 out of 11 users liked this review
