Appleseed

Why is it that once overwhelming forces finally have the protagonist cornered, they always wait around before killing them long enough for reinforcements to arrive and save the day? Appleseed is a competent action movie, or at least it would be if it spent some more time blowing stuff up and less time with little old dudes floating around philosophizing and talking about Gaia or some shit. I'm not quite sure how I really feel about it overall, because I appreciate a lot of the design elements and some aspects of the story that pits some angry humans against the artificial "Bioroids" that now control most of society. It just doesn't come together like a good film should, possibly because it's trying something a little different but it still has the stink of Japanese animation all over it.

The art style is a bit peculiar. It's all done in computers, but with some effects put on it to make it look more like traditional cel animation, a technique used more often in video games. It's not particularly ugly to look at, but I can't tell who it's supposed to appeal to. It has neither the fine detail of 3D animation nor the appealing smoothness of 2D, so it's stuck in the middle without a real strength. It works in games because it has some style while still being doable in real-time on modern machines, but it doesn't really make sense here. Otherwise though, it's a fairly watchable hour and forty minutes if you like seeing some robots shoot at each other and don't mind some long and relatively pointless exposition. Whenever a story with some depth to it is adapted to a movie, especially in anime, there's a chance you're going to get too much detail and preaching when you don't really need it, and that's the case here. At the very least none of it is painfully bad. There's a sequel that John Woo apparently had some input in, although I'm not sure if that actually intrigues me because it's been a while since he's made anything good.