It parks the Arcadia in front of you, skull prow first, black sails of dark matter bleeding off the hull, and dares you to care about anything else on screen. Aramaki's CG is the whole argument here: every rivet, every cape ripple, every fleet engagement rendered at a scale most hand-drawn space opera can only imply. Harlock himself is barely a man anymore, an immortal scar with a plan to detonate the galaxy back to zero, and the film knows that reading him as a hero is your problem, not his. Yama boards as a Gaia Coalition plant and stays a sulking blank, Yattaran keeps building his plastic models while worlds burn, and the plot knots itself into something closer to a mood than a story. Fans of the 1978 Matsumoto silhouette will argue about this one until they die. Watch it loud, watch it big, and let the Arcadia do the talking.

Far in the future, the descendants of humans who fled a ravaged Earth have used up the worlds they settled, and some 500 billion of them now want to go home. The corrupt Gaia Coalition rules humanity across the galaxies and controls Earth, now the most precious prize of all, while hiding the planet's true state. Captain Harlock and his loyal crew aboard the Arcadia stand against the Coalition as mankind's only hope of exposing its secrets. The film is a sci-fi action drama of space warfare and rebellion.