It’s been a while since I did a movie review, but this one is totally in line with the origins of this blog because it’s a movie based on the Jdrama series Galileo. I don’t think I’ve talked about Galileo in years (and maybe only briefly at the start of blogging) but this was one of the Japanese series that I watched in secondary school and one that I really, really loved.

Last year, I started reading books from the author of the Galileo series (Newcomer is one of them and it’s really good) and because I enjoyed them, I was very excited for this movie. Plus, it has a lot of nostalgia because of the original series.

Silent Parade is based on the slightly ludicrous premise that if a suspect says nothing to the police, they can be released even if there’s circumstantial evidence. When this silence causes Kanichi Hasunuma to be released for the second time, everyone is enraged. Especially the Namiki family, who lost their daughter Saori. When Hasunuma is found dead after the annual Story Parade, everyone becomes a suspect. For Shunpei Kusanagi, the thought that his inability to convict Hasunuma twice has led to someone becoming a murderer is almost too much to bear.

This movie was a bit different from the usual Galileo episode in that it doesn’t revolve around what seems like supernatural or unexplained phenomena (episode one of the series, for example, involves spontaneous combustion). We do, however, get a lot of callbacks to the original series, with Professor Yukawa’s trademark crazy laugh and Utsumi’s exasperation at his sometimes over-literal understanding of things.

However, compared to the original series, the movie doesn’t satisfy as well. For one, the plot isn’t quite as ingenious as some of the episodes. If you’re a fan of the mystery genre, you’ll probably be able to guess key solutions to the mystery. While I didn’t get everything correct, I got enough that it felt like I could more or less predict the plot, which is not something you want when watching a mystery.

Additionally, I really wanted more character development in this movie. We finally have three key characters together (Kusanagi disappears after the first episode of the series) and I was really looking forward to seeing how they grew. However, the character relationships only showed depth towards the end of the movie, and by then, it was too little too late. Kusanagi and Yukawa are supposed to be best friends, and Utsumi and Yukawa have a friendship from their cases together so seeing them hold back from one another was frustrating at times.

All this said, I did enjoy the movie. As a long-time fan of the series, I was happy to see our three leads back together and looking as though no time has passed (seriously, they don’t look like there was a fifteen-year gap between the drama and the movie). I’m also going to borrow the book the movie was based on, because I’m now very curious as to how the book compares.