Thunder 3

Episode 7

Enduring this abysmal show week after week is like mainlining concentrated disappointment directly into my veins with a dirty needle. I can't overstate how much I enjoyed the source manga, and my subsequent disbelief at how badly the anime adaptation has been so thoroughly botched makes me incredibly upset. How the hell do you turn a manga with such an insane premise into something so terminally boring? I'm at the point now where I feel we'd be better off if this adaptation never existed and Thunder 3 remained only as a manga forever. Thunder 3 is easily the worst CG anime since EX-ARM, and the worst manga adaptation since the travesty that befell Übel Blatt. My daughter's boyfriend (a university student of digital art and animation) had the misfortune to sit in the room with me while I exposed my trembling soul to this visual cancer, and his first response was “what the hell is this shit? It looks terrible.” So I know it's not just me that feels this way. Thunder 3's complete lack of competence, let alone artistic value, makes it a slog not only due to its glacial pacing, but its sheer, unrepentant ugliness. The show even attempts to lampshade its own awfulness when a side character, watching battle scene footage on a cellphone, remarks that it “looks worse than a PS2 cutscene.” They're right, but the production team calling out their own failings so blatantly isn't amusing, it's tragic, like a cry for help. Someone needs to call time on this bad joke and put both the animators and viewers out of their misery.

Once more, the funny little cartoon boys are almost entirely absent from their own show. The few disconnected scenes that do feature Pyontaro achieve absolutely nothing, and poor little Futaba is stuck all episode in the same room that she was in last time, and nothing further has progressed. The show's focus remains resolutely on empty shell Segami and his female fellow combatant whose name I can't remember. It doesn't matter. None of this matters. The entire point of the episode is to get to the point where the effects of the alien nasal spray thingy are introduced. Yes, it grants Segami's ally a cool (temporary) ability to teleport solid objects into the bodies of the evil alien aggressors, but it's too little, too late.

Up to this point, most of the episode consists of the least exciting action scenes ever animated. You would have thought that the decision to produce this show using CG would be to facilitate the kind of scenes only possible outwith traditional 2D animation, such as dynamic camera movement. Yet Thunder 3's camera remains almost resolutely static, apart from the occasional slight pan to the side, or gentle zoom in. There's no dynamism, no attempt to enliven the action. Neither human characters' expressions change in any meaningful way. To use the appropriate Scottish word, they're both terminally “glaikit.” Even the aliens, as they're shot down and slaughtered, don't seem to be able to move their rigid faces.

It doesn't help that every character rig is so poorly lit that they look cut and pasted into the scenery, rather than an integral part of each scene. Walk cycles are poor, and even the fight sequences are poorly staged. Segami almost looks kind of cool when he punches an alien with his powered fist thingies, but the fiery lighting grants him even more of a PS2 cutscene appearance.

This was meant to be the centerpiece of this arc, a punch-the-air moment as the human race begins to fight back against its oppressors. Instead it falls as flat as its characters. The last three episodes could have been combined into one, and nothing of value would have been lost. I can barely stand to watch such an entertaining manga be butchered any further. Someone, please, make it stop.

Rating:

Thunder 3 is currently streaming on Netflix.