Patlabor 2 Review

Set three years following the first film this film once again revolves around Tokyo’s Mobile Police Special Vehicles Unit, the unit assigned to investigate crimes involving Labors, the massive robots originally designed to aid in large scale construction but since adapted to other uses. This crew of cops had been Oshii’s playground for years prior to this film, the director having been involved with several earlier incarnations, and with OVAs, the previous feature, and a television series already wrapped up the thinking was that this film was the time to wrap things up, and so the basic formula has shifted slightly. In Oshii’s own words this film captures his characters on the cusp of change, caught up in larger issues than ever before and therefore forced to grow and adapt. And these changes are immediately obvious to any fan of the series, SV Unit 2 – the core unit of all Patlabor incarnations to this point - having largely scattered to the four winds since the previous film and settled into different jobs, leaving only Commanders Gotoh and Nagumo to hang the story upon.

Where previous Patlabor projects were noted for their character interactions and light tone, this is by far a darker and more serious affair, with a prologue set three years prior to the main body of the film introducing Tsuge, a Labor instructor who shares a history with Nagumo, taking part in a Labor based squad of UN peacekeepers decimated on their assignment when superior officers refuse to give the order for them to engage an obviously hostile enemy. Tsuge survives and returns to Tokyo but promptly disappears upon returning to his native land and is forgotten until what appears to be a Japan Self Defense Force F16 blows up a Tokyo bridge. The city is thrown into chaos, political forces arrayed against each other, as a campaign of terror slowly gains steam with no clear end beyond simply causing chaos. With Tsuge as the prime target and Nagumo’s past ties to him well known, Gotoh and Nagumo’s aid is enlisted to help track down the terrorists.

If ever there was a director capable of tackling issues of terrorism, politics and media manipulation, Oshii is that director. While admiring the passion of his villain and obviously sympathetic to his point of view – Oshii slaps out hard against the hypocrisy and willful ignorance required to maintain the “false peace” that is the status quo – he is nonetheless equally horrified at mankind’s potential for violence. His is a thoughtful look at the causes and results of terrorism, a philosophical treatise on what drives people to such extremes. Though it doesn’t reach the sorts of idea driven extremes Oshii embraced with his Innocence, this is by far a denser and more challenging film than Patlabor 1, a film that tucked its philosophy away under the gloss of high entertainment while this one wears its core issues on its sleeve.

This is not to say that Patlabor 2 is not an entertaining film, however, not by a long shot. The script, though dense, takes time to inject a dose of levity here and there as it unspools. While earlier incarnations tended towards action-comedy, Patlabor 2 is more of a political thriller complete with double agents and hidden agendas. It plays by a different set of rules than did the earlier entries but – as he has shown elsewhere – Oshii is perfectly at home dealing with political intrigue. The film also has the added benefit of digging deeper into the characters of Gotoh and Nagumo, two of the most intriguing characters in this world both of whom reveal much of what had only been hinted at before. And though the animation is clearly a product of its time – dominantly hand drawn and striving for realism – the artwork is uniformly excellent, Oshii here assisted by Satoshi Kon’s work as a key artist.

The limited collector’s set of the film is every bit a match to the excellent release given to the first film. Once again we get a quality remaster of the film, with both audio and video greatly improved from previous editions. English and Japanese soundtracks are both offered in 5.1 surround with flawless English subtitles. The second disc contains a forty plus minute making of documentary. The real plus on the feature front is, once again, the two books that come included in the heavy gauge box set. First you get an entire set of storyboards for the film by Oshii himself, then you get the Patlabor 2 Movie Archives, a 142 page book that collects every possible scrap of information regarding the production of the film. These Honneamise Patlabor box sets are simply stunning releases, absolutely packed with extra information to bolster the excellent transfers given to the films themselves. These come with our very highest recommendation.