Omni's Daily Dose of Anime

Briareos is also emotionally distant. We get a scene in which Briar (I'm just gonna call him Briar from now on) is just messing around with his equipment and returning static "I don't know" answers in response to Deunan's questions, but when she tells him "not to act like a robot" he seizes up and it's a great character moment between them which I wish we saw more of throughout the movie.

Not that we don't have plenty of Deunan/Briar screentime, but their relationship was honestly the most interesting part of the movie to me and I would have liked to have seen it explored even deeper.

Most of the movie is dedicated to addressing a terrorism in utopia (yeah, I'm getting dead drug dealers in Chumscrubberland flashbacks).

Apparently a whole half of the population is practically indistinguishable from human, but actually robots built to be near-human, composed of "superior materials". These are "Bioroids". Bioroids, as I've already stated have had their human impulses stunted, but in addition to this they have no independent reproductive systems and their lifespans are artificially limited.

The whole artificial lifespan thing is never really important, never really adequately explained, and never really existing for any reason other than to weakly ratchet up the tension.

The reproductive thing is the whole core of the movie, though. The name "Appleseed" is a reference to Adam & Eve.

One would think that Bioroids wouldn't be cool with having their rights limited like this, but they're apparently first and foremost "there to maintain peace among humans" a la vulcanizing.

This is eventually contrasted by the line "Bioroids don't kill Bioroids" which reeks heavily of what is now my third reference to Aliens, "You don't see them ****ing each other over for a ******* percentage."

It's all very cool and interesting and you can probably predict like two of the twists this movie's gonna throw at you already, but I have one simple question: If humans are still discriminatory ****s, then how did we not only get a population that is half robot, but a SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT THAT IS ENTIRELY ROBOT?

You kinda just have to take that big plothole and run with it. Run with it directly into the BIG OL' SLICE A CHEESE in the middle of the movie where we have to stop and talk about whether or not robots have the capacity to love.

My favorite part of the whole movie is easily when Rygart, the main character, is trying to feel out the mech with foot pedals and levers during combat. It really lends a distinct impression of machinery to see him operate a big honkin' robot like a vehicle.

It's a shame that the whole magic element is even a plotpoint at all, really. It's boring to see people just will the mechas to work, and it cheapens Rygart's success when his ability to pilot the mech isn't simply old school technical know-how, which this era of society may very well lack in such an age of magic, but that he himself is THE CHOSEN ONE in some way.

That sucks. It would have been way cool to see him go all Demolition Man on them, and show them how we used to robattle back in the day.

We have a sideplot of Briar battling mind control since the mad scientist used to be his doctor and puts nanomachines in him and that's about it.

Honestly whereas the first Appleseed's characters took a back seat to the action, this Appleseed's action takes a back seat to the characters, particularly one: Tereus.

And that's a shame for two reasons:

1.) Tereus sucks.

2.) YOU HAD JOHN WOO ON THIS ****ING MOVIE!


The most "John Woo" we ever get is robot doves. Yeah.
Appleseed + John Woo = Robot Doves

Anyway, my whole problem with Tereus is that Tereus IS Briar.

Apparently where Briar's remaining body was subsumed into his new cyborg body, his tissue was used as a template to build combat-oriented Bioroids which weakly translates to a pre-cyborg Briar walking around with his looks, personality, and mannerisms.

They sell this as the crazy new 3-man team with Deunan as a natural human, Tereus as an artificial human, and Briar as... a cyborg I guess, the trichotomy's kinda weak. Especially when it's not until the very end of the movie that they even work together, Briar gets injured at the start and Deunan's "forced" to partner up with Tereus.

Ummm... military... people? WHY? You don't think it might result in ISSUES if you separate romantically involved partners and replace one of them with a more attractive body double? That's more than a little ****ed up.

So from the get go we obviously have a stock list of themes we're going to desperately try to cover:

Deunan is going to see Briar in Tereus.
Tereus is going to be attracted to Deunan.
Deunan is going to be tempted to fall for Tereus.
Tereus turns out to be evil and/or Deunan resolves to remain faithful to Briar.
Deunan goes back to Briar.


OBVIOUSLY. DUH. The LAST movie was predictable, but this doesn't even try to have any twists, it's just a carousel of stock movie tropes.

I think my least favorite thing about the whole movie is how it treated both Deunan and Briar in general.

Briar wasn't very talkative in the first movie which might have served an interesting contrast to him pre-cyborg and Deunan, but in this movie while he appears to be emotionally distant since he can't emote with a face he TALKS UP A STORM and even has numerous scenes of yelling. I like that his voice actor has an opportunity to do something interesting, but EGH... I liked him better as the strong silent type.

Or is that just me?

Deunan gets royally screwed over big time in the movie. Not that they broke her character or anything, but they undercut it numerous times throughout.

I wanted ACTION GIRL, not DRESS-UP-IN-PRADA GIRL!

It's the same mystery that leads me to question why anyone would play Katawa Shoujo and pick anyone other than Rin. She's different, she's funny, and she just don't fit into your character archetypes, MAN.

Well, okay Rin's route in Katawa Shoujo was a godawful abusive relationship of a romance story and it totally put me off the rest of the game, SO WHAT DO I KNOW?

But the main point here is the similarity between the two characters, Yuuta is recently over what the show over-specifically refers to as "eight grade syndrome", while Rikka is dead center in it.

Approximately half of the whole is just the characters closest to the main two dealing with the goofy circumstances Rikka puts herself in in the spirit of LARPing like the true wielder of the Evil Eye she claims to be. The other half of the show explores why.


As it turns out, Rikka's dad died and she never really got over it, so as a form of escapism, she rocks an umbrella as a weapon and constantly refers to her quest to find "The Unseen Horizon", which seems to vaguely symbolize heaven, while under the thumb of "The Administration Bureau", which represents her older sister and other relatives.

It sounds really sad and endears us to the character when it's laid out like that, but I take issue with how it's presented which is to say how often it's presented.

This did not need to be a 12 episode series.

We take time to introduce ourselves to the auxiliary characters, Rikka's family, and develop the seemingly one-sided relationship between Rikka and Yuuta (which is Rikka finds Dark Flame Master fascinating, but Yuuta tries to quash her fantasies because it embarrasses him), but really they took too long to say it. And they said it too many times.

I get it, Yuuta's overly ashamed of himself and Rikka needs to get over her loss, but we take WAYYY too long to roll around to these obvious story goals.

A lot of scenes, particularly those involving Rikka's sister are totally unnecessary if not completely boring save the occasional glimpses into her adult life playing "house" with Yuuta's younger sister which serves to parallel Rikka's fantasies while simultaneously vaguely contradicting herself after she spends so long trying to straighten out Rikka.

Since so much of the show revolves around the familiarity of this escapism, when the curtain finally DOES drop everything becomes really awkward in a good and a bad way.

In a bad way because confessing her affection to Yuuta and ditching her fantasies suddenly makes Rikka a miserable normie who refuses to play with her long-time friend Dekomori, but in a good way because to my great relief that was the ultimate point of the whole show: everyone has an embarrassing phase, your WHOLE LIFE is an embarrassing phase, but the real threat is that phase you go through when you try to become someone you're not and conform, when in all reality, it's FUN to LARP, dammit.

Furthermore, Briar's physical limits are more clearly portrayed. At peak he can leap long distances while carrying Deunan and he can even flip a truck, but he has a tendency to run himself ragged before seeking help and this is when he needs to lean on Deunan for support which I just LOVE, thank you for this.

Briar's personality fits into a good notch between Appleseeds 1 and 2 where he talks when it's called for, but he's far from sociable. He's even more distinctly differentiated from Deunan for being a realist/pessimist while Deunan's an idealist/optimist. It's established right away that this is what attracts him to her, but Deunan and Briar's intimate relationship seems to be more on the backburner on this one since we don't give the details of their relationship much attention beyond a "I love him" kinda thing.

I think that kinda sucks, but since we're trading out the stupid dress parties for seeing these two work together in the field like they're traditionally expected to, I'm cool with it.

The fact that they're in a post-war dead zone again is attributed to a massive retcon the movie pulls which rewrites the events of the first Appleseed. Instead of being extracted to Olympus city and THEN meeting Briar in his cyborg body for the first time, Briar's already a cyborg and he and Deunan are still mercs doing post-war cleanup in an environment where territory is effectively divided up by gangs.

The whole theme of the movie is hope which comes in the form of rumors of Olympus city. Olympus city isn't simply a place neither of our heroes have visited, it's fairy tale, one which Deunan wants to believe, but Briar doubts exists.

This theme is easily the weakest thread in this finely knit sweater of a movie since scenes where the characters go back and forth about "having something to fight for" or "dying for what you believe in" are some of the most boring-ass cliched **** you'll ever hear.

Considering this level of cheese is far from new to Appleseed movies at this point, it's still worth pointing out that it's easily the least predictable of the movies as well so there isn't as much chugging through dialog just waiting for the inevitable plot bumps, plus, I have to say, the dialog is mostly pretty interesting in regards to how it manages the multiple tasks of world-building, character development, and exposition.