Gate 06 is about as expected, but here I'm coming up on a similar problem that I had with the episode I saw of that Shin Sekai anime in terms of using imagery without acknowledging any context.
So this episode directly references
Apocalypse Now, not only with Ride of the Valkyries, but with this as well:
And here is the original:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rAFMC2O9dQ
Which is fine and dandy, but it misses the entire point of the god damned movie or Vietnam as a whole.
And fine, I can understand why someone Japanese doesn't understand what Vietnam meant for America or why it is important. If Americans are allowed to be ignorant about the rest of the world, then the rest of the world gets to be ignorant of American history.
But it's like the guy who wrote this didn't watch the movie it references, only the "cool bits" on Youtube. So in case you've never seen the movie before, this is a scene that happens right after the helicopters slaughter the VC:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vbw0_YaUrNo
In case it's not clear, a chopper lands on the ground and tries to evacuate some civilians. It turns out that the civilians are also VC and one of them, a girl, throws a grenade into the chopper killing everyone on board. Those are American bodies on fire in that clip. Of course, then Kilgore calls them "fucking savages", reminding you that like almost all American military misadventures, dehumanizing the enemy is the only way that the American psyche can cope with the slaughter of all these people.
This isn't something that you pull out of your ass. It's in the film that they are referencing, so it is a bit distasteful to take a film that wants to look at the tragedy of war in order to turn it into a bland action scene.
And it would be something if the Japanese soldiers were ever in peril. Or if they called these fantasy humans "gooks" in order to show how they are very much like the Americans that are being referenced explicitly through the imagery. But this show doesn't aim for any of that, so my only answer would be, don't use one of the most iconic anti-war films as a reference for your goddamned action scene.
Hell, I'm not even against blind patriotism and warmongering in culture. I'm fine, at least broadly speaking, with Stargate SG-1 or The Last Ship or Independence Day or even Michael Bay films. But at least they have the sense to know exactly what they are, and they're not invoking Viet-fucking-nam for their war imagery.
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