Is this not something that you should watch the rest to find out? This isn't the denouement of the story. The point is that the infodump is entirely new information. We are supposed to see how the gang reacts to it, how it informs their worldview and their reactions to the things which will happen in their life in the future.
Personally, I think that in the invocation of the Vietnam imagery you're supposed to note the brutality of the situation only at this point. And in my opinion, the thoughts you have above are both valid interpretations of the series. Clearly it's provoked an intellectual response of some kind in you, even if it didn't work for you emotionally (and let's face it, the limited animation while Mamoru weeps in terror in episode 4 isn't that evocative) - obviously if that didn't arouse your curiosity to a sufficient extent to continue with the show that's one thing, but I'm surprised you weren't interested in seeing what consequences the show explored from that point.
Well, I gave it that one episode to see what happened, and the whole capture/separation thing really didn't do anything meaningful that justified that information being relayed to the audience. At the very least, beyond the fact that they get caught by that one older dude and led away with the (iirc) threat of their powers being removed, that episode's first 10 minutes has no direct impact. There really isn't any time to reflect.
You know,
Mass Effect 3 has DLC which is just alien talking heads explanation the shitty mythology to the player 10 minutes at a time. It's an easy way to relay information to the reader because there are very few ways to depict learning to the audience in context, especially in film/television.
And hey, most people rely on the out of context infodump (even Beasts of the Southern Wild briefly explains the Bathtub with a map sequence) because it doesn't really interfere with the story.
But if you make the attempt... it just has to be interesting to make it worth it. Either the information itself is presented in an interesting manner or the fact that the characters care about this information is presented in an interesting manner (aka, Spielberg-face).
And maybe it's because I've turned so hard on science fiction that I'm almost allergic to any speeches that last more than a minute. Thinking back on
Star Trek,
Stargate, and the king of infodumps,
Babylon 5 (
In The Beginning is essentially an infodump in movie form, come to think of it), it's not like I was always against people just relaying information to the reader. As a
Stargate fan, there was a few years where I actually cared about "The Furlings" (yep, SyFy writers sure are creative) and their place in the mythology.
My patience for that stuff wears pretty thin nowadays though. There are ways to do infodumps in and out of the context of the story in a brief enough manner that it doesn't get in the way of the story and bring everything to a screeching halt.
Space Brothers (the movie) summarized the premise of the movie with a cool looking montage of the various contributions humanity has made to space exploration.
Space Battleship Yamato 2199 summarizes the mythology of the show via a short scene where one of the main characters teaches a group of children by telling them why they happen to be living underground. Perhaps one of my favourite SF films of all time,
The Wrath of Khan, has a scene where the main trio sit in the room and talk about the bible for 5 minutes - "6 days?! Well, what about 6 minutes!" - but in the context of everything else, coming straight off a gripping action scene, I don't mind that scene and never skip it when I rewatch the film.
Heck, come to think of it,
Game of Thrones had to solve this problem by showing people fuck each other in order to make it visually
stimulating interesting to the viewer.
I do agree that infodumps are essentially selling a promise of better things to come. Part of the mythology of the world is established and you're meant to be curious about what else the universe might have in store. But you really need a deft and careful hand to deploy something like a 10 minute exposition scene in a manner that is easy to consume.
That said, I probably tolerate the infodump more than the shitty promise of "answers to be revealed later!" that a lot of SyFy relies on nowadays. Hey, I found out what the numbers mean and it turns out that I shouldn't have spent those 3 years of my life worrying about it. Go figure. (The Cylons. They Have A Plan. Really! We even made a movie called
The Plan that explains the plan after the fact!)
From a point of view of innocence, have you ever read Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (or seen the film by Mark Romanek)? There's a key scene in that where the high concept "twist" of the story is explained to a class of young children, and they have absolutely no emotional response to it at all because their environmental conditioning is so strong that they kind of had an idea about it all along. I see the children's reactions in SSY to be something similar.
I've seen the film, but I don't remember too much about it at the moment unfortunately.
