Heavy Metal

The first longer story, or rather burnt-out neonoir, about Harry Canyon is entertaining, surprising, and quickly engaging. However, when it suddenly ends, an avalanche of not only unexpected but above all boring and strange segments ensue, in the form of adolescent sketches with humor in rough-draft form. Only the final Taarna, inspired by everything possible, including my beloved John Carter, is suddenly calm, indulging in fantasy themes, and at times almost philosophical. I believe that for many viewers, this threw the whole concept off a bit, but for me, it saved the whole film. The segments I mentioned deserve to leap out of the 80s and into today, but I never want to hear about the rest again. (26.03.2021)

Ah, yes, the supposedly legendary animated sci-fi... you know how it goes with such legends. They are usually only a legend for those who refuse to confront their fixed memories of youth with reality. First of all, the script fails when several comic stories are very poorly connected by the theme of some green evil that runs through the individual parts. The stories have different qualities in terms of the script, ranging from average in the case of the final story, which seems to have come out of the world of Conan the Barbarian, to the ones that are simply bad, like the abduction of an earthling by two crazy aliens. Even the erotica that emanates from the delicate curves of the charming warrior or secretary, vaguely reminiscent of Marilyn Monroe, could correspond to the fantasies of 15-year-olds. Based on the title of the film, I would expect a much closer connection with the world of heavy metal music and that overall, it would be much more extreme, but this music only serves as a background to the individual comic stories and does not play any other role. Overall impression: 40%. Nowadays, it seems to me like a worn-out product, because both the film genre and the comics have undergone a long evolution... (25.11.2012)

A fascinating mature science fiction film that, while not a new turning point in the understanding of animation, manages to be appealing even after many changes in the way the medium of adult animated feature films as a whole is understood. In recent years, I've come to especially appreciate the references to classic science fiction from the dawn of the Golden Age (or even older ones), and I found plenty of them here. It's as if everything was influenced by Dejah Thoris and John Carter, Lord of Mars. (10.12.2020)