I saw Appleseed in the movie theater, mostly because I was curious as to what kind of anime makes it to the big screen in the United States. The answer to that question depressed the hell out of me.
I had high expectations the first time I saw it, and I guess that was my problem. At the time I was an anime neophyte who thought he knew better, having seen Evangeleon all of twice and laboring under the misguided belief that I'd seen it all. Besides, the descriptive paragraph in the lobby of the theater was so enticing - robots and clones and gloriously rendered 3-D backgrounds and hot chicks in pleather. I was consumed by the understandable desire to watch things blow up, so why not?
Turns out, I left wanting to gouge my brain out with a pointy stick. And now, having watched it again after picking up the DVD on the cheap, I feel like I should have.
On the big screen, the movie was visually stunning. The backgrounds glide by like the beautifully realized utopia they're supposed to represent, crisp and clear and immersive, and the characters themselves were well drawn. The villains had awesome technological abilities (like razor wire spit from their hands that, at one point, slice a car in half) and the plot, while not particularly inventive, at least carried the story along. It was fun - it wasn't much, but the opening few minutes looked amazingly good.
And then the dialogue started, and I started groping under my seat for a clue-stick.
The English dub was awful, beyond 'so bad it's funny' into the realms of the painful. It sounded like the voice actors had never seen the movie, didn't know anything about the characters they were portraying and were running as fast as they could to the paycheck waiting for them outside the recording studio's door, which is strange considering that most of them have worked in anime before. Their hearts really weren't in this one, and it was impossible to ignore.
I bought the DVD because I was hoping that the original Japanese audio track would allow me to at least give my ears a bit of a rest and let me more effectively enjoy the movie as a whole. It was good in theory, it really was - what I came to realize was that the terrible American voice acting served a very profound purpose - it allowed me to utterly ignore the fundamental problems that were built into the very concept of the thing, problems that were now, thanks to my unburdened ears, painfully apparent.
It's so derivative it's way past it being funny. It's like the most innovative storytelling characteristics to come out of anime in the last twenty years were all thrown together to try to craft some sort of uber-conceptual framework: Simulacra that are disturbingly human? Check. Mechanized robotic encounter/fighting suits? Check. A quorum of exceedingly wise men who nevertheless wish to accomplish something creepy and destructive? Check. A computer that is trusted to make decisions for humanity and who starts going slightly wonky?Got that too. How about cars that more-or-less drive themselves, a clash between the military, the civilians and the scientists, a robotic man with a human heart, a protagonist who feels disconnected from her new reality, a bad guy who's working in the best interests of all and extreme amounts of unrealized homo-erotic tension between two major female characters? Ooh baby.
The thing is, after awhile the tenuous plot strands that try their damnedest to hold it all together decide one by one to give up and go home to their estranged wives. It's majestic watching it all fall apart, calming really, as if observing a beautiful and relatively quick kind of entropy.
It doesn't collapse so much as it delicately crumbles, and when it gets utterly and brazenly ridiculous (with about twenty minutes left on a, I shit you not, remote mechanical science station that houses a stunning secret from our hero's past that'd have a hard time stunning a lichen-covered rock; you'll know it when you see it) you realize that you could've seen it coming if you weren't so caught up in how damned pretty the whole affair was.
I'd've been happy if it was at least entertaining, if not groundbreaking; it's a shame there wasn't enough of that to make it stick.