Today’s quick review: Appleseed. Deunen Knute, a highly skilled soldier, is brought in from the ruins of the world to the utopia of Olympus, a floating city established in the wake of an inconclusive global war. There she is reunited with Briareos, a fellow soldier who was once her lover, now made a cyborg after sustaining heavy injuries on a mission. Her skills are needed to help Olympus’s ESWAT team deal with a plot to exterminate Olympus’s sizable population of Bioroids, synthetic beings engineered not to have the flaws of humanity.
Appleseed is a Japanese CGI science fiction movie based on the manga by Shirow Masamune. The art style is an odd blend of cell-shading for the characters and realistic rendering for props and backgrounds, preserving the cartoonish look of the manga while using detailed CGI to show off the setting’s beauty, scale, and technology. The graphics quality is quite high, and it holds up well in spite of the film’s age.
The story is firmly in the realm of science fiction, asking what would happen if mankind was able to construct a race without its failings. Could they coexist? Would humans step aside? Or would there be war? The questions the film asks are philosophically interesting, although the limited length of a feature film means that Appleseed cannot fully do them justice.
The adaptation from the comics is an interesting one, as it takes the series’ characters, themes, and setting and uses them to tell a simplified, cohesive tale. The resulting story is somewhat more conventional than the manga, but it retains the series’ strong ideas and has a similarly complex plot. The film as a whole does a good job of condensing a complicated setting, philosophical questions, nuanced characterization, plenty of action, and a full-fledged plot into its allotted one-and-a-half hours.
The action is fast-paced and satisfying, making full use of the setting’s futuristic technology. Police in robotic armor and powerful cyborgs face off using heavy ordnance and all the mobility available to them. The writing tackles complicated concepts as well as can be expected. The English voice acting leaves something to be desired, though; watch it in Japanese with English subtitles if you have the option.
Watch Appleseed if you are in the mood for pretty CGI, a sci-fi story, and some action. Appleseed is a movie with strong fundamentals that works well from the perspectives of speculative fiction, action, and visual spectacle. Skip it if you are looking for a film with a straightforward plot.
7.0 out of 10 on IMDB. I give it a 7.5 for a nice blend of setting, character, story, and action.