LogFAQs > #940711500

39. Appleseed

Inviso: 23
Red: 30
Charon: 31
Jona: 34
Genny: 35
Karo: 39
Johnbobb: 40

Total: 232

Inviso: This movie feels like one of those films thats going to eventually mark a dividing line in this list, where I dont HATE the movie, but I dont particularly LIKE it at the same time. I dont know. There are some decent enough action sceneswhen the film tries to make action scenes. But far too often, it just feels like a lot of poorly-handled emotions and clunky dialogue. Everything is so on the nose, and theres a whole segment early in the movie that feels like exposition dump: the scene. Its vexing. I just dont know how to really classify this movie. It didnt frustrate me as much as some of the films below it, nor did it bore me, but it just doesnt feel like a high-quality film overall. The one positive Ill highlight though, is that I appreciate the constant twists of having the humans be the bad guys, only for the clones to turn out to be the REAL bad guys. And the real villain? Racism. Yeah, thats all. This isnt a great movie by any means, but whatever. It couldve been a lot worse.

Red: Well, some of the combat scenes are pretty exciting, so I guess this movie has that going for it. Beyond that, there isnt much going for it. You have some I guess they are robots that dont like humans and a plot of human sterilization or something that never makes sense because the two species(?) dont really seem to differentiate from each other all that much in the first place. But lets be honest, whatever plot there is merely exists to distract you from the fact that there is even a plot at all. If that line doesnt make sense, it means I succeeded in getting my point across.

Charon: A very basic, uninspired take on post-apocalypic science fiction. The story is overly complex, which makes it on screen appear as shallow and poorly structured due to the fact it tries to do too much and introduce a lot of characters you can barely remember the names of because they're all named after mythological gods. There's taking a theme a little too far, and there's Appleseed. The action sequences also weren't really that good and I felt they dragged on quite a bit in some segments. There's just not a lot of memorable things to say about it.

Jona: This movie looks great, has stylish action and a pretty sweet electronic soundtrack but everything else is just forgettable.

Genny: Imagine for a moment trying to set a PSX era RPG plot line to PS2 FMV level graphics and you pretty much have Appleseed. There's not a lot to say about it other than that it tries a little too hard and ends up coming across as a bit pretentious to me. There was definitely potential there for this to be a truly unique sci-fi experience, but it fails to connect on an emotional level so when 'x character betrays y' (which happens like three goddamn times in this movie) or when 'y character admits they have romantic feelings for z out of nowhere' (twice) I just do not care at all.

Karo: What It Is:
It is the first anime movie fully rendered in CGI animation. Because this was the mid 2000s and all that was needed to draw attention was a lot of polygons, people actually cared about it for some reason.

What I Think:
Whenever I hear the words 'first' and 'CGI' in the same sentence I know to duck and cover, because holy hell does this look awful. Everyone looks (and moves) like blow-up love dolls, and the environments look so unnaturally shiny that this society must consume 11 metric tons of windex each day just to function.
What little that is intriguing about the setting is quickly lost in idiotic action scenes that seem directed by a 12-year old boy, complete with ear-raping music, a million camera cuts a second, and enough explosions to make Michael Bay wet himself in ecstasy.
Stitching all this bullshit together is a confusing narrative filled with arbitrary betrayals and random plot twists, with all consistency thrown to the wind just so the writers can say 'gotcha' some more.
The protagonist's backstory changes so often it is nigh incomprehensible by the movie's end, and my understanding of what the hell is up is about equal to my level of caring about her or any of the other stilted, wooden characters. Which is to say about nil.
This is one seed that should have never ever been allowed to sprout.

Score: 21/100

Johnbobb: Man, everything about this movie was just unappealing. The story was boring as all hell. The characters were bland. The visuals and animation were (I assume) good for their time but man this is the exact type of animation that hasn't held up. Now everything just looks like a sub-par PS2 cutscene rather than an actual animated movie. Character models in particular are downright gross to look at half the time. I just really wasn't into this at all.

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Congrats to Advokaiser on being really good at predicting stuff