Two hours in and you're still bracing every time a placenta blooms on the hull. This is the whole first season of Knights of Sidonia recut with fresh sequences and rebuilt sound, which mostly means the Gauna scream at you properly now, and Polygon's cold CG stops looking like a compromise and starts looking like the only honest way to render a hollowed-out asteroid ship full of people who photosynthesize instead of eating. Nagate Tanikaze comes up from the underground bilge as the last kid who trained on the old Tsugumori simulator, and the movie doesn't soften a single thing that happens to him after that. Hoshijiro. You know the moment. What comes back wearing her face is one of the cruelest ideas mecha anime has ever committed to. And in between the massacres, Lala Hiyama the bear serves dinner and Izana keeps sitting a little too close, and Nagate just wants rice.

In the year 3394, the alien Gauna have long since destroyed the solar system, and what remains of humanity survives aboard seed ships that fled a thousand years ago. Sidonia, home to more than 500,000 people, drifts through space until the Gauna threaten it once more. Tanikaze Nagate, an enigmatic young man from the ship's hidden depths, joins his friends in fighting back against the colossal creatures while trying to uncover what they truly are. The film condenses all 12 episodes of the first season into a single mecha sci-fi action feature, adding new sequences and reworked sound effects.