Appleseed: Ex Machina – DVD Review
Available through Warner Bros. Home Video

The product of a truly eclectic team including producer John Woo and costume designs contributed by Prada, Appleseed: Ex Machina is a mixed bag. Bouncing frantically between breathtakingly stunning and outright ridiculous, the latest Appleseed adaptation seems to be a case study in multiple personality disorder. Is it a character driven love story? Is it an off-the-rails action ride? An existentialist cyberpunk yarn? A political cautionary tale? Wait… It’s not a zombie movie, is it? What could easily have felt like a smoothly flowing Tarantino-esque amalgam of homages and tributes often comes off as disjointed and jarring instead.

First the good news: Visually, the film is impressive. So impressive, in fact, that it makes the (stunning at the time) 2004 version seem like a slapped together proof-of-concept render. Everything from the character designs to the animation have been polished and refined, apparently having borrowed a few class notes from the Square-Enix school of computer animation. There are also enough new interesting and distinct mecha designs to fuel a merchandising franchise, fingers crossed. The plot is serviceable and new, retreading some ground but with enough new context to distinguish itself from earlier versions and touching on several truly fascinating ideas, if only briefly. Of course, the story still revolves around the Appleseed universe’s omnipresent themes of globalization, militarization and naturally, mechanization. But it is the exploration of some these concepts that are left ultimately unfulfilled.

It’s difficult not to blame producer John Woo for the problems. For all the recognition that he receives, not a single prop nor shout-out to the man has ever been attributed to his keen sense of subtlety. This particular venture has the fingerprints of his heavy-handedness all over it. Compared to previous incarnations involving somewhat ethically and politically complex motivations for altering mankind’s path, the villain of this piece is so sinister and off-the-wall that he might as well be wringing his hands and cackling, if not stroking a cat from high atop a tower somewhere. Throw in the requisite excessive slow motion and doves in every other shot, and you can almost picture Woo behind the scenes shouting, “Dammit, make sure you remind them of when my movies were awesome.”

As a fan of the original manga, one constant disappointment keeps rearing its head for these adaptations, though. For some reason, they can’t leave the relationship between main characters Deunan and Briarios alone. Maybe the creators have preemptively assumed audience resistance to a romantic relationship between a butch ass-kicking girl and a guy with a stoplight for a head, but there seems to be a constant focus on whether the duo can truly trust each other. Now, considering one of fifty-seven main themes in Ex Machina is the well-worn conflict of man vs. machine and the idea that cyborgization and/or cloning exist in the Appleseed universe as stand-ins for racial inequalities, the strife between our heroes here isn’t exactly a surprising plot twist. Still, it seems unfortunate that gone are the days when, for all the problems prevalent in Masamune Shirow’s dystopian vision of the future, you could take for granted the reassuring idea that a girl could love her robot man without such token reservations.

(photo credits ©2007 SHIROW MASAMUNE / SEISHINSHA・EX MACHINA FILM PARTNERS)

By Eugene Poon