This movie was supposed to be some kind of "revolution" in the Japanese movie market: great actors, great story (based upon an icon of animation from the 70-80ies), great CGI...BUT only CGI should be considered good. The acting is too mediocre especially Kimura Takuya whose presence is in 95% of the footage. There is absolutely no believable romance between the main characters, the last 20 minutes are dull, amateurish in both script and acting. The only good part is the CGI but you will see it only in 5% of the movie as i said before the other 95% is occupied by Kimura Takuyas face...

To recap in short:

The Good: CGI,the fact that its based on a successful anime series.

The Bad: acting, story, the last 20 minutes, lack of battle scenes involving the Yamato, dumb and very stupid aliens.

An alien race known as the Gamilas has launched a nuclear attack upon earth and after five years of increased radiation the human race has been forced to go underground in order to survive. Realizing that their spaceships are no match against the Gamilas, the Japanese send their new battleship (the Yamato) off on a desperate mission to the planet Islandar to find an anti-radiation device to save the earth. Now, from what I understand this film was based upon a popular anime series and as a result there was quite a bit of storyline to pull from. Because of this massive quantity of information, the film was hard-pressed to cover all of the details necessary and character development was especially limited. This was made even more difficult due to the large amount of combat scenes. On the other hand, the special effects were quite good and kept the film humming at a fast pace. In short, although it might help to have read the books or viewed the anime films first, it isn't a requirement and as such it's a pretty good science-fiction film in its own right.

I honestly think this movie is a bit overrated. I won't say it's a bad movie but in this genre there are just much better movies than Space Battleship Yamato. First of all it's too long. There is absolutely no need to stretch this movie that long, as a ninety minutes movie would have been fine. The CGI's are not the worst thing I ever saw but with a budget of 12.000.000 you can do better. The acting is Japanese and by that I mean you will get a bit of overacting and alot of screaming instead of talking. It just looks like that are always angry and have to spit out every word they speak. Maybe it's just me not understanding the language and maybe Japanese think the same of English speakers but I doubt that. That said, the story isn't bad but just too long. This movie doesn't deserve ten stars like it doesn't deserve 1 star either.