Appleseed Ex Machina – Review

Started off great, now only if John Woo did not direct it maybe it wouldn’t have fallen into the Action Hollywood trap.

Let me start off by saying I have never seen the Appleseed anime. I think I blew it off back in the day. Oh well, my loss I guess. But anyway, in general you really do not need to have seen the anime to appreciate this movie, though if you did, I think you would have liked the story a tad more if you had. I know when I was watching, I really did not connect with a certain story element that clearly seems to have been taken from the series, so I wasn’t familiar with the background of what was going on. You won’t get terribly loss, but you will be wondering where the hell something even came from.

So let’s start with the obvious. Appleseed Ex Machina is a CGI anime style movie and it looks really good. Square Enix or Pixar quality good? Maybe not, but in its own way it stands on its own two feet. That and how well Deunan looks offsets all the imperfections of everything else. She was pretty damn sexy. Notice how all the screen shots are close-ups of her =)

So let me set this story up. World goes kaboom once again and half the population is dead! Original stuff huh, that’s Sci-Fi for you. In a world of conflict, the city of Olympus is born. What makes Olympus special is that peace is maintained by bioroids, genetically engineered humans whose emotions are completely repressed, therefore their decision-making cannot be affected by emotions such as hate or fear.

We have two partners in crime, Deunan and Briareos. Deunan I have already mentioned is a super sexy gal, Briareos on the other hand is a cyborg. A freak accident during a past war had rendered his body useless and he opted for a new experimental cyborg body to continue living on. With this new cyborg body, he has gained tremendous strength and other attributes far superior to that of the average person.

The story kicks in when a Deunan gets a new partner, Tereus. What’s so shocking after their first encounter is that Tereus resembles Briareos in every way before his accident. He looks exactly like him, has retained all Briareos’s memories and his fighting strength.

Then we have what can only be called the formation of Skynet! The mayor of Olympus has gathered all the leaders of the world and has proposed that they hand off control of their satellites over to Olympus so there can be a worldwide surveillance network in which the world can be monitored and protected. During the conference something goes terribly wrong with the citizens of Olympus and soon the conference is underattack.

That’s pretty much the story in a nutshell. The main group responsible for the attack is soon unraveled and what follows is a long action sequence of bullets and whatever you can attribute John Woo filmmaking too.

And before I close, I watched this in English, that’s right! It sounded well too. Not once did I hear a misplaced voice actor, you know when a voice doesn’t fit with the character you’re looking at, none of that here. Everyone sounded good. Especially Deunan =)

Impressions – In terms of story, it could have gone somewhere, but midway the movie reminded itself it was directed by John Woo and had to abandon all efforts into trying to establish a meaningful plot. It then reverted to a generic, for a lack of a better word, “boss battle” and mindless action shots. I did enjoy this movie for what it was. It looked great, the action scenes were really good but really cheesy. All in all, you may want to check it out.

Rating: 2.5/5