What do you get when you combine stunning VFX with tracing paper–thin writing and a Kawai Kenji soundtrack? Garm Wars. Acting: 2 Cinematography: 9 Editing: 7 Music: 10 Visual Effects: 8 Writing: 3 The opening sequence hints at a vast depth of lore that the film will explore over the next 80 minutes or so. It shows us gigantic fighting machines, a barren post-apocalyptic landscape, and a civilization so heavily networked and information-dependent that every member seems to be absolutely covered in wires and tubes. It's great for getting your hopes up. But they'll be dragged down over the course of the film by: 1) Some shoddy VFX among the mostly well-crafted animations—especially one notably bad fire that's on screen for about ten times as long as the amount of effort put into it deserved. 2) Bad edits—worst of all, several jarringly bad continuity errors where a character's head ends up facing the precise opposite direction of the previous shot, or a hand instantly changes places. 3) The aforementioned bad writing. None of the characters seem to have believable motivations. It's basically impossible to care about anyone except maybe—just maybe—Khara-23 (and it's a stretch to even care about her). If you want to be dazzled by some great-looking VFX set to an amazing (as usual) score by Kawai Kenji, go ahead and watch this. If you want a story with depth, pass. The most you'll get out of this is some not-too-subtle Christ imagery (this is why I have to mark this as a spoiler).