Appleseed: Alpha, a quick review....

When I was an adolescent, I saw the original Appleseed movie on a shelf in my video rental store's anime section. Around that time I'd watched a few animes thanks to 'Akira', something an 11 year old probably shouldn't be allowed to watch :S

But something about it didn't appeal to me. And honestly not much has changed over the years. I don't really like watching anime because although the art is often good, and stories CAN be interesting (albeit very different to what we're used to here in the west), I'm not a big fan of anime as a style generally and I'm much less a fan of the low, low frame rates that MOST anime movies operate in (likely to make it easier to produce a feature-length film; 8 frames per second of a figure moving, or still figures with just their mouths moving like something from a thirty year old Hanna-Barbara film...).

Nevertheless, while preparing for a MASSIVE stream of Long War of the Chosen using a huge collection of cosmetic mods to add custom characters of great notoriety to my X-Com forces, I added 'Briareos'. I searched YouTube for him to hear his voice to select the best one from the character building options, and this led to a few different Appleseed films popping up in the search and suggestion results. I hadn't realized they'd made more films.

Watching a brief CGI clip from 'Alpha' I thought it might be worth giving it a chance.

So in many ways the art and design was great. The story was reasonable enough. Many of the character designs (especially the walking, mobile fortress) were very cool.

But honestly, not trying to be mean, but the production itself was akin to an opening cinematic in a lower-rank AAA or double-A Playstation title. It just didn't look right throughout, hard to watch.It was also unexpected and really offputting to see "cyborg" badguys that look extremely durable and tough being shot a few times by small arms fire (meaning 'normal bullets') and dropping like flies easily. First they're cyborgs.... second they look tough. They appear formidable, therefore they should be. This is just how stories are set up and should then play out for your audience. Making ominous looking enemies that weak now puts the onus on your audience to INVENT a reason rapidly in their minds for why such characters are so easily dispatched. So, okay, are these assault rifles shooting at them REALLY powerful? Okaaayy.... But that was another issue in the movie, firearms did not sound right. They sounded weaker than they should have. So now your 'powerful' weapons able to kill cyborgs easily sound pitiful, again jarring on the mind of your audience.

People that live for the sake of ingesting copious amounts of anime and whatever else won't care. They'll excuse it all, not because they're so generous to the producers and content creators, but because they just want to consume and consume and enjoy at all costs to credulity. I am sorry, but I'm the audience, I'm to be catered to, and I'm not supposed to have to suspend every faculty to sit through a film.

Again with sound, Briareos's voice-actor was miscast. A HULKING beast of a cyborg had the voice of a guy around 5'9, 170 lbs maybe. It also for whatever reason was not put through a filter at all in order that it sound augmented/robotic (I admit I've now seen another Appleseed film - review to follow - so I guess having a human voice is part of the character?). There's also no 'speaker' the voice emits from, although certainly a hi-fidelity speaker COULD put out a very human-sounding voice. Again, it's up to the audience to IMAGINE everything. Don't make us do that. It distracts from the rest of what's going on. This is bad story-telling.

I also have to say "Two Horns" was an incredibly annoying character. Really animated voice-acting, and that's fine, it's not the actor's fault, he delivered precisely what they were going for. Also annoying was that again and again we saw small arms fire taking out large mechanized drones and being shot at armoured vehicles. Small rifles that sound like that don't penetrate armour. Once more the audience is being jolted out of the story.

Also jarring was the inconsistency of animation efforts put into some characters more than others - facial expressions and detail specifically. Because the standard is uneven this takes away. The mechanic looked like someone from PS3 while the young, dark-haired girl was from PS4...

The "punk" cyborgs all looking the same also added to just how stale the film felt.

Some blond bimbo assassin and a hulking sniper cybor sidekick, this story could have obviously been so much more with incredible action sequences (I'm just reminded of how briareos was written to be suffering from power-issues for half the film so that he was uninvolved and completely reserved as if they'd WANTED the film to be boring and have low stakes, rather than have him kicking butt against a lot of bad guys from start to finish... OR having him struggle against a load of bad guys - oh yeah, at the opening he does NOTHING while they're under attack, doesn't even lift a sidearm). Anyway, the pacing was just very wrong for this film.

I'm honestly not sure what they producers set out to do with this show. It's like they thought, "I dunno, wanna make a CGI Appleseed?" "Okay." And then they just started to with only a rough idea of how it was going to go. Why with the near limitless potential of CGI wouldn't you stroyboard and script something that would blow people away? (Having watched the other Appleseed movies, there was a lot more punch) Perhaps they wanted it to be more 'gritty' and down to earth? You can do that with it still being entertaining. Think of the Blomkamp films.

I apologize but I can only give this show 1/5 stars *
(appropriate for 14+)

I would never watch this movie again. But if you're interested, you can rent it on YouTube streaming and even buy it on amazon.

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Past VODs are all at my YouTube channel.

And I also hope your conscience towards God has been stirred. You can ask Him questions at a website I'm still constructing - www.HeHasAnswers.com - and even read what I've written thus far regarding the irrefutable evidence of His existence (or LISTEN to a rough recording of that at my ministry YouTube channel)

God bless you and good night!