You know, when I review one of those Marvel superhero movies and have to say "this is the 34th film in the series", I wonder who in the world would possibly be tempted to dive in, having missed more than 100 hours of prior watching, and think they could possibly make sense of anything.
Well, hold on to your hat, because here's a cinema event that has just over 400 episodes of Manga television series as backstory, so I guess it's genuinely one for the fans.
Even the title feels like similar amount of effort is required just to read it, with its colon followed by its em dash, Bleach: Thousand Year War - The Calamity, but please let me try and sum up more than 20 years of storylines in case you're tempted.
The series started in 2004 with the lead character, high school student Ichigo, becoming a Soul Reaper or 'Death God', something like a cross between the Grim Reaper and a death doula.
A bunch of Ichigo's classmates, it turns out, also have magical powers, and they all band together to save the life of another Soul Reaper named Rukia.
And then, just like that epic underworld battle between the different powered beings in the Twilight or Harry Potter films, about the next 10 years of plot are about this millennia-long power struggle between the Soul Reapers and the Hollows, the Jets and the Sharks of the Japanese magical underworld.
Along the way, this bunch of friends stick together through thick and thin.
There was an original television series that ran for eight years, a few movies, and over the past few years there's been a finale quadrate of 12-episode seasons that, apparently, bring all these decades of storylines to a conclusion, that all carry that sub-heading of 'Thousand Year War'.
Bleach: Thousand Year War - The Calamity is part one of the very last of these, and is actually a special cinema version of the first three episodes of this 'finale', playing for a limited time, and with the rest of the episodes being released later in the year.
For fans of this long-running series, that is the equivalent of dressing up as a Hobbit and going to the opening night of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings: Return of the King in cinemas in 2003, a milestone celebration of everything you love.
In this film-slash-three-episode-combo, Ichigo (Masakazu Morita) is central amongst a final epic battle between the Soul Reapers and the Quincies, but enemies must unite to fight off an even bigger threat to the reality they all live in.
What is the experience like up on the screen?
The animation approach of Bleach is fairly iconic, it's been around for decades and has informed the styling of many contemporary manga/anime, and it is really lovely seeing it on the big screen, a sumptuous palette of colour and dark lines.
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The screenwriting is also iconic in its own way, I'd say holding very true to the approach across the decades of the storytelling that precedes it.
That sentence was the nice version of my thought, but to spell it out, gosh Bleach can be impenetrable in the way it can drag out a thought, a plot line, a moment of dialogue, far worse even than Days of Our Lives.
There are great fights, a lot happens, but absolutely nothing gets resolved, at least in this little cluster of episodes, and fans of the series are going to be left with narrative interruptus.
Dendy Canberra Centre is playing the Japanese language version with English subtitles but there are apparently English language versions playing at some cinemas if reading is an issue.