Another film by director Keita Amemiya (Zeiram, Hakaider '95, two of the 90s Kamen Rider films, much of the Garo franchise...), Moon Over Tao: Makaraga has the gorgeous costuming, set designs, and special effects common to his work. Sadly, what it does not have is his typical focus or sense of pacing — the plot is pulled in too many different directions and the film takes too long to move between its (admittedly solid) action set pieces.
Moon Over Tao feels like two scripts stapled together. There's the A story, wherein a samurai and a drunken onmyoji are sent out on a quest to uncover the secret behind an enchanted sword; and the B story, wherein a trio of nearly identical alien warrior women feud over the recovery of the "Makaraga," a world conquering weapon which has errantly fallen to Earth. The narrative interweaves these stories awkwardly, with the latter alien plotline interrupting the former narrative rather haphazardly — not helped by looser storytelling that doesn't explain itself until late in the film.
Amemiya's earlier film Mirai Ninja is straightforward to an absurd degree. It's Star Wars by way of Dragon Quest 1 and the mecha ninjas and gun-katanas don't attempt to disguise that. Moon Over Tao, by contrast, is heavily overcomplicated. Are we dealing with bandit raids? Alien revolutionaries? Feudal warlords? Cursed swords? Planet conquering monsters? Rival wizards? A po-faced take on Zeiram? Most every individual element is good but few of them mesh.
On top of that, it takes too long to start and too long to end. (The film has three false endings before it finally resolves!) It's 90 runtime would have been fine with a tighter script but as it is the film both has long stretches where nothing happens as well as elements which are heavily underdeveloped. Notably, the young female lead — who you might mistake for the protagonist — accomplishes very little, and the aliens are treated as basically inter-replaceable. The whole B story feels like an afterthought. This weighs down the film and it's vexing (to say the least) how all the women are siloed to the lesser half of the movie.
That aside, the fights are largely excellent as is the special effects work (some charmingly spotty CGI aside). The costuming is quite good. The aliens' have cute robot spiders pets, which I love. The samurai and onmyoji are surprisingly fun characters, as cliche as they are — what if Kazuma Kiryu and Obiwan Kenobi teamed up to dismember bandits? And it's always fun seeing a tokusatsu just let loose with the blood and gore. (Tastes may differ.)
But that's just not quite enough to carry 90 minutes. Moon Over Tao is both too much and not enough movie.
