- 1.9KShares
The first Berserk: Golden Age movie dealt with various threads, but its main concern was the portrayal of Griffith’s relentless ambition. This second film follows the same idea, but this time centering more around kinship and belonging.
The movie opens with the troops of the Midland Kingdom’s Band of the Hawk and the Chuder Empire’s Blue Whale Knights locked in battle — but something seems off. The Hawks’ raid unit captain Guts, still affected by the words from his general Griffith, swings his sword with wild abandon, while the female commander Casca seems afflicted by something else.
The enemy general takes this chance and manages to force both Guts and Casca off a nearby cliff, leaving the Band without two of its key figures. They survive the fall, broken by a river, but with one wounded and the other feverish, Guts has to make sure to get them both dry and warm as fast as possible while hiding from enemy forces, who are in search of their corpses — or their blood.
Barely past the ten minute mark, through a flashback, we’re reminded of the kind of world Berserk takes place in: an infant Casca barely escapes sexual assault by a nobleman with the aid of a young Griffith, who hands her his sword and tells her to take it if she has something to protect.
Once awake, Casca, indignant at having been saved by the one she hates the most, for some reason shares with Guts her dream: to be Griffith’s sword always. This resonates with Guts who, after overhearing Griffith’s “demands” that a true friend should never live under someone else’s dream, questions his life until that point, and his place among the Hawks.
The pair notices a squad of enemy soldiers outside the cave they’re taking refuge in and decides the time to leave is near. Once outside, they’re soon ambushed by the enemy contingent. Guts urges Casca to escape, to which she begrudgingly agrees, promising she’d be back with reinforcements. What unfolds is one of the most grizzly sequences of the movie, where Guts single-handedly faces a force 100-men strong. But underneath the visceral action, it briefly elucidates what kind of man Guts is; there’s something inside him that has begun a transition, and it can’t be stopped.
This climactic scene is a good place to discuss some of the film’s visuals. A technical issue that comes back from the first movie is the stiff movement of the characters, with some animations feeling incredibly unnatural in their weightlessness, which stand out even more during action scenes. Although somewhat less prevalent since the first movie, it’s hard not to spot these animation hiccups.
Some poorly done character expressions resemble NPCs from a rushed JRPG.
Similarly, facial expressions are at times as tense and rigid as the polygons they’re plastered on; and in the medium of anime, where a lot of the emotion and expressiveness is dependent on changes — at times remarkably subtle — in the eyes of a heavily stylized face, this can be a big problem. This sometimes leaves us with characters that resemble NPCs from a JRPG that, by the grace of an overworked animator in a team that had to ship the game last week, has a simile of a face with moving parts. Does this happen very often? No, sometimes we have 3D models with better faces, and at others with hand drawn features that look good. But this just makes the subpar ones protrude like a sore thumb.
After Guts’ brush with death, we see the titular Doldrey, a seemingly impregnable fortress within the kingdom’s territory. It’s currently occupied by the Empire, and many have fallen trying to take back. During a meeting of the Generals of Midland where they discuss their next move, Griffith makes use of his persuasion and the winning momentum of his Band to be assigned to the recapture of Doldrey.
The battle for Doldrey is grander, bloodier, and more chaotic than ever before.
It’s this part where this movie shines the most, where the battle is grander, bloodier, and more chaotic than ever before, yet it’s easy to follow the action and tell which unit is from which troop once both armies clash. This might seem like an obvious thing, yet there are many battles in other shows where once the action begins, it’s easy to lose track of who is doing what to whom, ending up as a mish-mash of jerky camera work and similar-looking soldiers killing each other. A prime example of this is the Three Kingdoms TV series from 2010. In Berserk‘s take on a massive army battle, while there’s the occasional bad 3D animation, for the most part it looks at least good enough to lose yourself in the moment, which is great considering the significance of the event.
The Band returns triumphant with a parade followed by a ball in their honor, where every member of the Hawks is elevated to the status of nobles by the king; it seems like the perfect way to end things, a dream come true for what started as a group of common mercenaries. But Guts is of a different mind. Now that the war is over, overcome by the desire to be Griffith’s equal and to live for a dream of his own, he decides to leave.
This upsets the majority of the big players in the Band, most surprisingly Casca, who tries to convince him to stay. Griffith, unlike her, doesn’t try with words but with his sword, reminding Guts that the rules to break free from him remain unchanged.
The effects of their duel have a huge and lasting impact on the world of Berserk, and the consequences are felt swiftly and brutally. Like the first film, Berserk: Golden Age Arc II goes out on a tense note, with Griffith — left with his spirit broken and fallen from grace — in a dark pit due to his own lapse in judgment, in the process destroying the army that he so tirelessly put together.
This film is done better in comparison to the first.
Despite this being a compilation movie, this second film in the series is done better in comparison to the first. Fans of Berserk will notice changes and omissions of important moments and characters, like the bonfire scene seemingly replaced by the dance scene. While I much prefer the original rendition, most of the changes make sense and allow for a better flow of the movie, and a viewer that is not familiar with the source material would probably not notice the missing bits.
This movie, unlike the first, also has the added value of elaborating on certain details that the ’97 anime skipped. While the ones here are not necessarily important, this starts a trend that continues in the third movie, which closes out the Golden Age Arc.
- 1.9KShares
- 1.9KShares