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NEWS: Discotek Adds The Venus Wars Science-Fiction Anime Film

Mr Adventure wrote:

Waaaaaaait..... There is a Japanese Blu-ray for Venus Wars? WHY WAS I NOT INFORMED?!

I thought everyone in the thread was aware of this... I checked it out in 720p, and it looks fantastic, so a real BD must be quite something. Yeah it's not huge budgeted, so it something comparable to BGC's BD, where you still get all of the nice benefits of sharp lines, color correction, and TONS of dynamic grain.

UtenaAnthy wrote:

I mostly like this movie, my only real issue with it is that soldier character who came off as a rather heterosexist portrayal of a gay man. .

Yeah that was a really odd, unnecessary and weird character. Like there was no reason to have a token gay guy show up 3/4 through the movie. Perhaps they wanted to make the point that EVERYONE (male and female) thought Hiro was attractive. But hey it was the 80's, wasn't someone gay in "Top Gun" or something? Maybe that's what they were going for *shrug* . It's such a small part of the film, it's easy to overlook.

Prede wrote:

UtenaAnthy wrote: I mostly like this movie, my only real issue with it is that soldier character who came off as a rather heterosexist portrayal of a gay man. . Yeah that was a really odd, unnecessary and weird character. Like there was no reason to have a token gay guy show up 3/4 through the movie. Perhaps they wanted to make the point that EVERYONE (male and female) thought Hiro was attractive. But hey it was the 80's, wasn't someone gay in "Top Gun" or something? Maybe that's what they were going for *shrug* . It's such a small part of the film, it's easy to overlook.

To be clear, I'm not objecting to the presence of a gay character in the film (or the fact that he was somewhat flamboyant/camp, some men are, some men aren't, regardless of sexual orientation), I just thought it was all like "heterosexual cute good teenagers" vs. "evil gay homosexual queer of flaming deathlust", I know he's not the main villain, but he's the only LGBT character in the movie (as far as I can remember) and it just came off as rather homophobic, I agree it's not a major part of the film, but being bisexual myself, I found it somewhat upsetting. I'm not saying you can't have an LGBT villain in a movie, but it's not ok to present their queerness as the source of/reason for their evil. Does this movie do that? I wouldn't definitively say it does without seeing the movie again, but that's somewhat the impression I got. In fairness, maybe the creative staff's intentions were good but their execution was poor, they may have been anti-prejudice but without the writing chops to pull off the character.

Ironically, the director also did an OVA adaptation of one of the first BL manga, Kaze to Ki no Uta SANCTUS -Sei naru kana-, two years prior.