Appleseed: Ex Machina

David Hollingworth straps himself into a landmate in preparation for the latest big screen Appleseed adventure.

The sequel to 2004’s Appleseed opens in a typically grandiose gunfight, with Olympus City’s elite ESWAT team taking down a bunch of heavily cyborged hostage-takers in a church. If you’re not familiar with that first film, or with the manga both movies are based on, then you might feel a little lost, but the action’s fast-paced enough to draw you in almost immediately. It’s frenetic, over the top (in a good way), and it’s all very very familiar, for some reason...

When you get a look at the credits, and the frequent (and oddly important) clouds of doves that swarm Olympus, it all starts to come together. The executive producer of the film is the action veteran John Woo. Suddenly the slo-mo cyborg mojo and plot of tough-loving your partner back to two-fisted glory make sense!

The plot is at one and the same time complex and remarkably simple. On the complex side you’ve got Olympus City – a kind of post-global-apocalypse Switzerland – trying to unify the Earth’s various nations under one security satellite system, run-amok cyborgs, mysterious mobile phone technologies and genetic flesh and blood copies of now fully cyborged partners… gasp! But the simplicity kicks in pretty early. After all, this is Appleseed – there ain’t no problem that can’t be solved with the application of a little bit of angst and lot of high-calibre weapons-fire.

Appleseed, in both the first movie and in the four book manga, has always been about serious political in-fighting backed up by military hardware. The second film follows that recipe, but the politics and machinations are very much filler in between fight scenes and shoot-outs.

Which, oddly enough, is no bad thing, especially when all those fight scenes are rendered in stellar proto-cell-shaded style. The first film looked good, but this one is a downright masterpiece of animation, with every character fully motion-captured, astounding technical marvels (the landmates, or armoured suits, and hover vehicles are as stunning as anything in Ghost in the Shell), and cityscapes of wondrous beauty.

We saw Appleseed: Ex Machina as part of the Sydney Film Festival, but it will be getting a limited release this month as part of the Reel Anime festival (alongside Batman: Gotham Knight, Vexille and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time). It will eventually make a DVD release in September, too, but this really is worth catching on the big screen. For one thing, how often do you get to see top-flight anime in a movie theatre? For another, this is a true big-screen experience, and the sound work in the film really deserves to be heard in the best possible environment.

There's even a thread organising Atomicans to go see it together, so there's no excuse to miss out!