Review of Astra Lost in Space

Astra Lost in Space is the perfect example of a series with earnest intentions that cannot help but undermine itself at every turn. It claims to take its story seriously but plasters it with candy-coated visuals and drawn out comedy. It wants us to buy into the survival of these kids, but refuses to give them hardship. It wants to be cinematic, but never warrants it. It wants to have cliffhangers, but fails to generate tension. It wants to develop its characters, but instead fabricates their plots out of thin air only to still drop or homogenize their stories despite that. It works passably aslighthearted entertainment, but any ambitions beyond that fall staggeringly low for the most part.

To start with, the actual concept of characters being stranded in space, or being on some sort of traitor hunt isn’t original even to anime, with material such as They Were Eleven, Infinite Ryvius and Rokka no Yuusha already present. The execution could’ve made up for the unoriginal concept, being a successful blend of wonder, danger, adventure and sci-fi with character driven proceedings to make each cast member deservedly memorable in their own right. Sadly, Astra’s tendency to have its cake and eat it too undermine every one of these by forcing those aspects to take turns.

For a show with “Lost in Space” in its title, it never throughout its entire run (beyond perhaps, Episode 1) communicates ANY genuine sense of danger. The colorful visuals lack any sort of grit to make situations tense, the planetary dangers are never more than minor inconveniences, and it will refer to either a forced, sappy character moment or a forced, sappy comedy moment any time you think it will get serious. The use of blood is nearly non-existent beyond a total empty consequence, and there is no visible death or even could-be threatening pursuers on their tail. Instead, Astra decides to have a beach episode on what should’ve been a hostile alien planet. Complete with forced fanservice.

One episode though does seem like it would actually be about survival when the ship crashes with a broken engine. This lasts for all of.......10 minutes, before just so happening to find another ship that just so happened to land on the same planet, be the same model as theirs, AND have a detachable portion to get the ship up and running again. This did everything possible to trivialize a potential dangerous situation. It nonetheless tries to make moments feel intense by tagging nearly every episode with a cliffhanger, but most of the follow ups are either not worth it or straight up fakeouts. One twist, involving an unexpected character, has basically nothing to do with the actual point of the show and feels like it was just there to have another twist, or shatter the show’s gradually poorly conceived main setting. The one attempt to add consequence as the series nears conclusion fails to actually create a major ripple as a series about survival should make. So, yeah, the survival aspects of the plot are a complete bust, but hey, maybe all that time was really focused on enjoyably investing character drama to make this cast one of the most charming and memorable ensembles as of recent. Well, not exactly......

In my review of Persona 4 The Animation, I mentioned how the series managed to effectively juggle lighthearted, distinct character moments with a serious plot, presenting strong personalities to the entire cast with unique personal conflicts that were properly built before their prominence and still touched on after their climaxes. It even managed to effectively lead into scenes that were more serious without feeling out of touch.

Sadly, Astra’s character moments, however they may be, can’t even come close to poignant. In this show, character handling is present, particularly in the first 2/3 but done in the laziest way possible. Generally, a character will have basically nothing on them at the beginning, then randomly, some event will happen that forces them to dump their entire backstory out, a “survival” event happens that said character supposedly helped with even if they do nothing for it, and then the character is instantaneously forgotten about otherwise for the entire series. This is the case with Yunhua, Quitterie, Luca and Ulgar. And the worst part about these moments is that it never feels like the characters have personal conflicts and relatable doubts they want to overcome like the Persona 4 characters. Instead, it comes across as them wanting to just not have to deal with shitty parents. Nearly every backstory is working along the exact same motif and the series only becomes more plot driven overtime, so there’s nothing interesting to really learn about them for viewers. And then other characters like Aries or Zack don’t have this attempted depth at all but instead are purely driven by the plot without any real attempts at actual change. It’s incredibly disheartening all around that this is what the show focused on so much, yet it’s so predictable, boring and lacks both interesting issues at play and palpable story effect for far too much of the show. Kanata’s the one exception to this rule since for once he feels consistently driven overtime, and that’s cool, but I still think that there was more the series could’ve done with his character arc in regards to genuine survival stakes we currently don’t have.

All of these aspects are made ever more detrimental by a certain plot turn in the last third of the series. At this point, all character proceedings are dropped for a plot driven focus featuring extremely poorly thought out sci-fi and a traitor reveal that questions why the character even needs to exist and makes the character in question look like an absolute idiot for not capitalizing on opportunities way earlier that the show decided to section off for “antics” that needed to exist unnecessarily. When a series like this wants to make a plot twist that completely changes the direction of the series, don’t do it when you only have four episodes left to do it in! Doing so will make the conflict feel unearned and lacking the proper fleshed out focus. A show like Madoka Magica heavily hinting at the plot turn early on and giving it 80% of the run to be fleshed out did far more for its thematic heft than what little attention Astra gives it. It’s genuinely disappointing given the topic it attempts to cover with this is actually pretty interesting if it had any time to make impact or didn’t make those outside the field look like complete morons, but that’s what you’re given as flat as it is.

Speaking of flat, there’s also the animation. While certainly having color and showing potential early on, it’s stiff to an almost painful degree. Characters barely feel like they’re moving at all most of the time, as it swaps between manga frame to manga frame at an incredibly frequent rate. Having more animation would certainly liven up affairs because there isn’t anything interesting done with the shot composition once the first episode’s space scene is over. It also would help the space setting look far more distinctive. Shows like Space Dandy are light years ahead of it, and even older series like Outlaw Star and hell, Sonic X Season 3 managed to make their space settings more interesting to look at, as well as more tense. And yet despite having color and a few semi-interesting planets early on, the animation never properly conveys grit over Crayola colors, which for a series like this riding on the survival of its characters should be required. But nope, this lack of effort contributes to the emptiness of the entire Astra experience.

As for the music, it’s passable, nothing less and nothing more, which it should be better given the scale thousands of other space based projects do with their scores.

Conclusion

Astra Lost in Space in general could be seen decently as simple lighthearted entertainment that starts semi-well and ends better than what most of the middle comprises as, but it really shouldn’t have been. It SHOULD have been an investing space survival character drama that could have time to explore its lategame plot twist to a more thorough level, but instead, it barely touches on this with otherwise useless plot twists, empty cliffhangers, flat characters and no real backbone to anything it’s attempting. I can only really feel ashamed by the show for how many balls it tried to juggle with the simultaneous effort to throw them up incredibly slowly and drop all of them to the ground in very soulcrushing fashion.