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Full Metal Panic!: Mission 02

Review Date: 2005 July 17 16:02

Reviewed by: Spike

Released by: ADV Films

Age Rating: 15+

Region: 1 - North America

Volume 2 of 7

Length: 100 minutes

Subtitles: English

Audio: English 2.0 Stereo
English 5.1 Surround
Japanese 2.0 Stereo

Summary

Few holidays ever go according to plan, and the school trip that Suosuke and Kaname are on is certainly no exception. Now the pair, along with their classmates, has had their plane hijacked by terrorists and taken to a rebel airbase in the depths of Siberia instead of enjoying the sunny beaches of Okinawa. A vicious and merciless terrorist has taken Kaname and is intending to remove the secret of the ‘whispered’ from her brain by force if necessary, and only Suosuke and the forces of Mithril are in any position to save her and the rest of the class. With time running out before Kaname folds under the experiments of her captors, can Mithril pull off the desperate rescue needed to save the prisoners and keep the power of the ‘whispered’ from falling into the wrong hands?

Review

This second volume of this series is certainly a departure from the schoolroom based hilarity of the first disk, and focuses more on Mithril fighting the terrorist threat that seeks to possess the mysterious power of the whispered for themselves. Kaname is now forced to confront the fact that Sousuke isn’t just your average military nut and is in fact an elite soldier, leaving her slightly scared of him, yet realising that he’s been protecting her all along. Sousuke however, is in his element, back conducting operations with his fellow soldiers and not having to deal with the idiosyncrasies of high-school students. Sousuke’s major flaw with dealing with others seems to stem from the fact that he seems unable to process the various intonations and subtleties of human interaction, such as humour or sarcasm, notably absent from most military organisations, leaving him totally clueless in conversations with most people, and usually Kaname!

In the last volume, I noted how this series almost schizophrenically flips between being a zany high-school comedy and a serious mecha drama, and this volume almost proves the point, with almost the entire disk devoted to hard-blooded action. Up until now we’ve only been treated to Kaname’s outlook on life, but now we see what happens when she has to live in Sousuke’s world, and it’s not an easy reality to grasp. If you’ve watched the first volume of this show then you’re probably already hooked and waiting to see how the highly-strung schoolgirl and the fish-out-of-water soldier are going to get along without killing each other and wrecking their surroundings at the same time. The second volume of Full Metal Panic brings home the reality of the situation and the means that the terrorists use to secure the power of the whispered. Miss this at your own peril.

Rating: 8/10

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