Tag: SF

Planet Dune

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★★★
“Tremors in Space.”

On the one hand, this is obviously The Asylum’s mockbuster version of Dune, and that carries with it weightily low expectations. But, dammit if I didn’t actually enjoy this more than Denis Villeneuve’s ponderous epic. This is about seventy minutes shorter, for a start, with considerably better pacing and rather more of what we wanted to see: sandworms. Admittedly, the sandworms here are sometimes very poorly-animated – the sandworm riding scene… yeah, they should probably not have bothered. But it has energy, and the characters appear to care considerably more than Paul Atreides, for whom simply getting out of bed seemed like a chore.

The heroine here is Astrid (Killian), a pilot in the Space Force who gets cashiered after disobeying orders, and rescuing a Russian astronaut. As punishment, she’s assigned a crappy ship, with a crappier crew, and sent on a crappy mission to a crappy planet to pick up a craft with which contact has been lost. Of course, it turns out to have been preyed upon by sandworms, making Astrid’s mission considerably trickier, as these worms feed on iron, can smell your blood and are hungry as all get out. Fortunately – and this is just the first of many similarities to Tremors – they can’t get you if you’re on rocky terrain. You’ll certainly be forgiven, when Astrid starts making home-made explosives, for muttering “A few household chemicals in the proper proportions…”

If this is Dune, it has had all the political and religious overtones removed, and stripped down to a pure slice of action SF. I can’t say I mind too much, since what’s gone was probably my least favourite aspect of the bigger movie. I also have to respect the great way in which nobody makes a fuss about how, including Astrid, three-quarter of her new crew are women, along with her commanding officer (Young, looking a bit puffier than when she appeared in David Lynch’s Dune. Mind you, that was 37 years ago. I’m a bit puffier myself than I was in 1984). This is the way gender equality should be in the future: completely unremarkable. Again, an improvement over Dune which is as archetypal a example of male saviour complex as you could want.

There’s certainly an extraordinary amount of running about (Sean Young excepted…), to the level of a particularly energetic Doctor Who episode, and I liked Killian as a heroine: she’s very tenacious, and doesn’t let bureaucracy get in the way of doing the right thing. While the worms may not have been all that, some of the space effects were actually perfectly serviceable – likely as good as anything The Asylum have ever produced. If you are expecting Dune, you are clearly going to be massively disappointed. Hell, even if you are expecting Tremors, you’ll be underwhelmed. But as a cheap, B-movie slice of pulp SF, I found this perfectly fine. I just wish Astrid had yelled after taking care of one of the worms, “Broke into the wrong goddamn space-ship, didn’t you, ya bastard!”

Dir: Glenn Campbell, Tammy Klein
Star: Emily Killian, Anna Telfer, Manny Zaldivar, Sean Young

Perilous Waif, by E. William Brown

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Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆

In the future, humanity has spread across much of the universe, but has also adopted all manner of enhancements, with androids and other artificial creations likely outnumbering the people. This section of the galaxy has become a vast cosmic melting pot of cultures with worlds occupied by everything from religious cults to yakuza gangs. Alice Long is an orphan on the strait-laced planet Felicity, but clearly doesn’t fit in, possessing an unusual range of those enhancements, to go with her leaning towards delinquency. Running away from the orphanage, she rescues a woman from attack, and in exchange for her help, becomes one of the crew of the slightly grey-market Square Deal, under Captain Sokol. However, as Alice blossoms, it becomes clear her obscure heritage has blessed her with artificial talents far outstripping Alice’s new colleagues. 

Initially, I really liked this, appreciating the enormous amount of thought which has gone into the universe here. That’s clear from the multiple appendices, explaining technical aspects of how everything from interstellar travel to artificial intelligence works in this setting. I was greatly looking forward to seeing Alice rising from a lowly cabin girl to… well, wherever her skills might take her. Except, it didn’t quire work that way. Her rise is, in fact, super easy, with any impediments barely an inconvenience. For example, this is a universe in which fabricators can be used to make anything for which there’s a recipe, and Alice becomes increasingly over-powered due to all her enhancements. No matter what the situation, it seems she has an app for that. She’s certainly the smartest person in the book, and may well be the strongest, fastest and most lethal as well. Then there’s her heritage, best described as unique. And even if she were to be killed, it’s established that people can get restored from backups into a new body. Death, where is thy sting?

It’s an issue of which the author does seem to be aware, with a mention in one of the appendices of “post-scarcity society”. That seems to be the situation which we have here. Brown spent so much time on the dazzling infrastructure, he forgot to come up with the equally dazzling threats necessary, in a world whose inhabitants calmly discuss the possibility of them surviving a multi-gigaton nuclear blast. There’s absolutely no shortage of action, in particular a final third where Alice has to fight her way off a massive, derelict starship after betrayal by the people they are supposed to be helping. But, while this is currently a stand-alone book, it also has too many loose strands left dangling at the end. My overall feeling is that, while this is a fascinating universe that could serve as the basis for many great stories, Alice Long’s just isn’t one of them. Or, at least, she needs an antagonist of comparable ability and power.

Author: E. William Brown
Publisher: Independently published, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book.

Robowoman

  By

★½
“Roboring.”

Winner of the 2021 award for Movie Least Like the Poster, we have another poverty row production from the man who gave us Nemesis 5: The New Model. And by “gave,” I mean, no-one in their right mind would pay for it. This is little or no better, though likely benefited from being watched the same evening as Hellfire, which made Robowoman look as if it was unjustly overlooked by the Oscars. It was not a good night, shall we say. The only saving grace was Chris being out, otherwise I’d have had to cash in my entire annual allocation of martyr points. Anyway…

It’s 2024 Los Angeles, and black-market surgery offers cures for almost all ills. A dinner date for Vivica Stevens (Heising) goes wrong when she’s raped and left for dead by Jonathan (Nation) and his pals. Dodgy physician Dr. Michaels (Novak) saves her and outfits the victim with a robo-arm and robo-eyes. Vivica returns to life with her housemate, Evangeline (Price), but is overcome by an urge to use her new-found robo-talents to take revenge on Jonathan and the other perpetrators. But at what cost to her humanity?

First thing: Heising is in her late sixties, though dresses like a woman half her age (let’s just say, I don’t think her encounter with Dr. Michaels was the first time she’d gone under the knife…). While respect is due, it still makes the whole rape thing highly suspect, and some other scenes, such as the gun dealer who comes on to her. The action here is also pure, undiluted shit, largely due to Ferguson’s complete inability to film it. Multiple scenes are shot from behind Vivica, with her completely obscuring any action. Or it may even be a stand-in; her head is frequently cut off by the framing too. I repeat: pure, undiluted shit.

I did quite like Price, who has an easy-going nature in her performance, which appears to have strayed in from a better film. There’s also a scene at a self-defense class where Heising actually emotes to semi-decent effect. However, these elements are vastly outweighed by negatives, such as the lengthy scene of the heroine eating a pizza. Or the robo-arm which is obviously just a plastic glove, while her robo-vision looks like a 99-cent Geordi LaForge accessory from Party City. Or even the sense of location being derailed, by the Los Angeles cops that stop and question Vivica and Evangeline, sporting Texas patches on their sleeves.

With some adjustments, and a budget in line with the script, this might have passed muster. As is, we have to try and believe that hanging up some decrepit blue tarps makes a room a hospital. That’s more effort than this deserves and if you can manage it: well done. Even a walk-on part for scream queen Brinke Stevens (maybe they should have made her the heroine?) at the end, is unable to elevate this to the level of watchable.

Dir: Dustin Ferguson
Star: Dawna Lee Heising, Sue Price, Jonathan Nation, Mel Novak

The Fox and the Eagle by David Kantrowitz

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Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆½

I don’t typically buy fourth books in a series, but didn’t actually realize that was the case here until after I’d finished it. From what I can gather, this is set in the same universe at its predecessors, but introduces a new set of characters. It certainly works well enough as a stand-alone entity, and poses no problems read on its own.

There are really two action heroines here. Evangeline Adeler is a CIA agent, who is investigating a strange series of abductions, when she becomes its latest victim. Turns out these are carried out by the Kira’To, aliens from a nomadic asteroid called the Eagle, hundreds of light years away. Humans are being taken  in order to provide “a fresh genetic source” for the Eagle’s inhabitants – inbreeding generally being a bad thing. However, Eva is having none of that, escaping an arranged marriage and winning her freedom after prevailing in a trial by combat. The other heroine is Reveki Kitsune, a teenage girl and farmer’s daughter, who ends up the sole survivor after an attack on her uncle’s spaceship, the Fox, by members of a neo-criminal group called the Syndicate.

Due to this, she inherits the Fox, and meets Eva, who becomes part of the ship’s new crew while looking to find a way back to Earth. Their subsequent adventures take them on a raid to acquire a stash of neptunium, discovering the truth about Vecky’s parentage, and linking up with Tomoyasu, a long-time exile from the Eagle who is seeking to return there in order to stage a coup. The Eagle has a Japanese-based culture, for reasons apparently related to previous injections of abductees from there, This means Tomoyasu can take over if he can beat the current leader in a samurai duel.

It’s a decent slice of space opera, though does get rather confusing during the final battle on the Eagle, where Kantrowitz struggles to keep his multiple balls in the air. At one point, it looked like a major character had been disposed of with a single sentence, though I should have realized from this, that it was a red-herring.  Still, he has some occasionally nice turns of phrase. For example, I particularly liked this line: “The pistol made a sound like someone dropped a steel refrigerator full of beer one hundred feet from a helicopter onto a concrete surface.” I was also amused by the way Eva likes to drop Earth culture references, e.g. “Thank you, Doctor House”, which no-one else ever gets.

She’s definitely the most bad-ass of the characters, and I did feel the split focus of the narrative was a bit of a problem. Her story ends up having to share chapters with Vecky’s and Tomoyasu’s, when I’d have preferred to hear more about Eva – as a newcomer to this setting, I’d have been learning about the galaxy at large, along with her. Everything ends in a bit of a cliff-hanger, with the roles reversed: Eva is no longer the only “stranger in a strange land,” and it’s clear that further parts will be arriving. I’m somewhat interested in more, but would welcome a sharper direction on the writing.

Author: David Kantrowitz
Publisher:Kyrie Devonai Publishing, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
4 of 4 in the Reckless Faith series.

Jolt

  By

★★★
“Crank-ette”

Certainly the kind of action film for which you need to suspend your disbelief. In this case, the closest parallel is, as the tag-line above implies, the Jason Statham vehicle, Crank. In it, Statham’s character was poisoned, and had to keep his adrenaline permanently up for the rest of the film. to avoid dying. Here, it’s almost the reverse. Beckinsale’s character, Lindy, was born with a rare condition, “intermittent explosive disorder”. This is pretty much what it sounds like: uncontrollable aggressive outbursts, like a physical version of Tourette’s. This is a real thing. Not so real? Lindy is also “blessed” with high levels of cortisol, which make her faster and stronger than anyone else. Somewhere in the middle? Lindy controls her IED with electric shocks from a handheld device given to her by her therapist, Dr. Munchin (Tucci). All told, I’m tagging this as SF. #ChangeMyMind

She’s just about coping with life, until her new boyfriend, accountant Justin (Courtney), turns up as a corpse. Turns out he was working for some very shady characters, and apparently paid the price. Time for Lindy to put her affliction to good use, despite the efforts of the cops, such as Detective Vicars (Cannavale) to prevent her. She works her way up the criminal food-chain towards Gareth Fizel (David Bradley – who played Walder Frey in Game of Thrones, so knows about getting hunted by single-minded young women!), cracking heads as appropriate. Yet, things may not quite be what they seem. Not least, after the opening narration by Susan Sarandon, we kept expecting her to show up. You’ll have a wait. It’s also obvious that someone like Lindy has her uses, as a blunt instrument with which to solve other people’s problems.

While the ending is very clearly trying to start a franchise, I’m not certain there would be much more to offer. It is a pleasure to see Beckinsale kicking butt, in a way we haven’t seen in a few years (probably since the last Underworld film, Blood Wars). However, I can’t help thinking she doesn’t seem “right” for this kind of characters, which I would have expected to be all rough edges, rather than Beckinsale’s smoothness. It almost feels as if it was, perhaps, originally written for the likes of low-budget action god Scott Adkins, only for them to do a quick search-replace of “he” with “she” in the script, after Beckinsale showed interest and they got more money. Even there, it might have been more convincing with somebody like Ruby Rose as Lindy, who could bring the necessary edge to proceedings.

To be honest, the action was a little disappointing too – perhaps more so in quantity than quality, as it does have a couple of decent, well-choreographed brawls. I didn’t feel particularly as if there was much sense of escalation to proceedings; I mean, it’s not as if Bradley is going to pose much of a threat, is it? I can’t help comparing it to Black Widow which, despite its flaws, did build to a rousing climax. Here, although I was never bored, it is kinda easy to see why this bypassed cinemas and went straight to Amazon Prime.

Dir: Tanya Wexler
Star: Kate Beckinsale, Bobby Cannavale, Stanley Tucci, Jai Courtney

Chameleon Assassin, by B.R. Kingsolver

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Literary rating: ★★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆½

This takes place in a mildly post-apocalyptic version of Toronto. Climate change and other global issues have helped trigger a sharp increase in mutations among newborn children. Some are positive; others… not so much. The social upheaval also occurring around this time has led to a sharp divide between the haves and the have-nots, with the former able to enjoy considerably more than basic essentials such as clean air and water. The latter struggle to afford these necessities, creating a vicious cycle of deprivation. Libby Nelson rides the razor’s edge between the two worlds. While a mutant herself, she has been blessed with abilities rather than cursed with ailments; she can change her appearance and also disrupt electrical currents.

These two talents have brought her a career as a hired assassin, thief and investigator, working on behalf of various commercial or business interests, as corporations have replaced governments. Her latest commission is working for the local Chamber of Commerce – not quite the charitable group they currently are! – to look into “luvdaze”, a new drug which has recently started to flood the market, both locally and across the continent. They want to find out who is behind its production and distribution. However, the deeper Libby digs, the more dangerous her mission becomes, as she approaches the murky ares where organized crime and corporate malfeasance cross paths, with both groups very intent on playing for keeps, and taking no prisoners.

It all feels rather contrived, right from giving the heroine not one but two positive mutations, as well as a remarkable array of skills, devoted friends and physical beauty. She is even literally kind to orphans, a revelation which you’ll understand may have provoked a derisive snort. There’s heroic, and then there’s positively beatific, y’know. On the other hand, given her ability to look like absolutely anyone, it seems oddly limiting, or shows a lack of imagination, that’s she’s working as a freelance security consultant. Five minutes thought about how to use the skill, and I imagine most people would easily be able to come up with more profitable – or, indeed, more interesting – ideas.

I can’t say this is badly-written. It is, however, remarkably “meh.” There’s no any particular progression or escalation, which would potentially lead to a building sense of excitement. Things happen, but they aren’t described in a particularly exciting way on their own, and nor do they combine in a way which is greater than the sum of their parts. I only finished reading the book a couple of days ago, and it has already all but vanished from my mind. For the purposes of this review, I had to look up basic information like the name of the heroine or the city in which it took place, such was the lack of impact. Like the creature in its title, this book has faded quietly into the background, and will soon be entirely forgotten.

Author: B.R. Kingsolver
Publisher: CreateSpace, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of 5 in the Chameleon Assassin series.

Vexille

  By

★★★★
“Breaking the lockdown”

In the second half of the 21st century, Japan closed its borders, after a schism between it and the rest of the world over the development of advanced androids by robotics pioneer Daiwa Heavy Industries, which the United Nations wanted stopped. For a decade no foreigner has been allowed in, and no-one knows what the country is now like. Then evidence arises that makes government agency SWORD embark on an “off the books” mission, to insert a team into Japan. It doesn’t go well, and before long the only member left active is Lt. Cdr. Vexille Serra (Kuroki). She discovers the country is now run by Daiwa, and things are… not what you’d expect. She links up with the head of the anti-Daiwa resistance, Maria (Matsuyuki). But time is running out for them, and the rebels are forced to mount a last-ditch attack on Daiwa’s island headquarters, in the hope of preventing a similar fate befalling the rest of the world.

I was surprised to find how far back this was released, because the animation doesn’t feel 14 years old. It’s a slick combination of CGI and cel work, that looks particularly good in motion – and there’s no shortage of that. The other thing the film does well is balance the plot and the action. The central idea here, that Japan reverted to the state of sakoku, which isolated the country from 1639 to 1853, is intriguing – if a bit implausible – and the story delivers a few unexpected twists on its heels. However, it never topples over into grinding philosophical discussions about the meaning of life, what it means to be “human”, etc. and so is a marked improvement over some anime shows about androids [certain Ghost in the Shell incarnations, but I am particularly looking at you, Mardock Scramble!]

Instead, it uses the scenario as a jumping-off point for a number of wonderful set pieces. Firstly, an initial assault on a Colorado mansion which reveals the evidence of Japanese activity, and ends in a giant fireball to rival all giant fireballs. Then there’s a chase through a docks, between a super-powered motorbike and several mecha suits. And finally, there’s a long, extended attempt to get into Daiwa’s headquarters. This involves a full-speed race through service tunnels connecting it to the mainland, while pursued by “jags” – rogue nanotechnology, whose form and behaviour are not dissimilar to the sandworms from Dune. It is all great stuff, and the soundtrack, produced by trance DJ legend Paul Oakenfold, helps drive things forward.

Vexille and Maria are definitely the two main characters, so there’s no doubt that it deserves to be included on the site, and they have rather more success getting into Daiwa than the male members of the resistance. There’s no much background on the heroine; she has a relationship with another member of the team, its commander Leon Fayden (Tanihara), and his capture by Daiwa is about all the motivation provided. Or necessary, to be fair. Providing you aren’t looking for something deep and meaningful, but enjoy a good high concept, and watching things whizz past at a high rate of speed, this is a solid success as a slick piece of entertainment.

Dir: Fumihiko Sori
Star: Meisa Kuroki, Yasuko Matsuyuki, Shosuke Tanihara, Takaya Kuroda

Appleseed Alpha

  By

★★★½
“Before the war”

Though the most recent story told in the Appleseed universe, at the time of writing, this was the first to take place. It’s set before Deunan (Christian) and Briareos (Matranga) arrived in Olympus, back when they were still struggling to survive in the harsh world of the 22nd century, created by World War III. They are a pair of former soldiers, operating in New York, doing jobs of questionable legality for boss of the Big Apple’s underworld, Two Horns (Calvert). Their latest mission is to clear an area of automated drones, which now attack anyone who enter. While doing so, they rescue Iris (Palencia) and Olson, who are being pursued by Talos. He’s a cyborg, who needs Iris in particular to access and control a land battleship, which he’ll use to destroy New York, because… Uh, I’m sure he has his reasons. They’re just not very clearly explained in this installment.

That’s one of the few mis-steps in this, even if it does kinda rewrite established franchise history about how Deunan and Briareos got to Olympus. It’s a wonderful glimpse into a blasted world, with New York eerily short on people, and far from the bustling metropolis it was, pre-war. Oddly, the subway still seems to function, as we see in the opening scene, when D+B are attempting to complete one of Two Horns’s jobs, delivering a vaccine to him. Let’s just say, this particular subway line may be experiencing delays for a bit. I actually watched this back-to-back with the original 1998 film, and there’s a drastic contrast in style, with the CGI here slick and generally showing impressive detail. There are some jarring exceptions; a car flipping over looks like no effort went into it at all. But the finale involving the land battleship is undeniably spectacular, and may be good enough to make you forget the earlier glitches. Always good to finish on a high, and this certainly does.

Its plot is not dissimilar to the original 1988 version, with a young girl the key to a terrorist acquiring a weapon of mass destruction. The main difference is that D+B are operating as independent contractors, rather than state-sponsored security. This probably makes their actions more heroic; they could simply have walked away from Iris and Olson, as not their problem. But perhaps the most interesting character arc belongs to Two Horns, who goes from employer to enemy, before eventually riding to the rescue after discovering, first-hand, how much of a bastard Talos and his sidekick, Nyx, can be. I must admit though, to finding Deunan’s costume a tad distracting, since it appears to be designed largely to draw attention to her beautifully detailed, CGI cleavage. While I’m not typically going to complain about that kind of thing, the rest of the film is rather too classy for this to be needed.

Dir: Shinji Aramaki
Star (voice): Luci Christian, David Matranga, Wendel Calvert, Brina Palencia
[While it seems odd, I believe the English language version is actually the original,  with the Japanese being the “dub” in this case]

Appleseed XIII: Tartaros and Ouranos

  By

★½
“A Herculean labour to get through”

These two features, Tartaros and Ouranos, are an edited-down version of the Appleseed XIII series. This consisted of 13 episodes, each 22 minutes long, with their release beginning in June 2011 and running through the following January. Obviously, if you do the math, you can see that some fairly harsh scissoring was needed to get that down to a pair of 85-minute films. It also loses the obviously episodic nature, with some of the parts intended to be stand-alone. But, if I’m blunt, I think the problems here are considerably more intrinsic. By the end, I was glad I had decided to go with this version; the prospect of sitting through the longer version had little or no appeal at all.

The most obvious problem was the animation style, which managed to combine the worst features of both CGI and traditional animation. The end result is something which looks flat-out ugly, and thus a far cry from creator Masamune Shirow’s original art. For what I can only presume was good reason, the producers decided to have 13 different animation studios handle things, each doing one episode. While they were all clearly working from the same source material, it’s obvious that they were not all equally competent. Especially when compiled together, the decent bits simply make the bad look all the worse; it would probably have been better had it all been bad. As the original 1998 OAV showed, your eyes can get use to limited animation eventually – providing it isn’t frequently been shown anything else.

The other issue is a story which felt, at best, like another warmed-over rehash of previous elements. Oh, look: pro-human terrorists are threatening the peace of Olympus. Yes, again. It also drops in weird elements which made no sense. Did you know Deunan’s mother was African, and was killed while walking across a street reserved for white people? Briareos is also African. I’m not quite sure what woke point writer Junichi Fujisaku was seeking to make with this, also a sharp deviation from Shirow’s material. But it’s so badly-handed as to actively subtract from proceedings, and has aged very poorly over the decade since. A lot of the content is “inspired by” Greek mythology, in particular the 12 Labours of Hercules, to the point it feels on occasion like a SF episode of The Legendary Journeys.

The overall story arc mostly concerns Olympus’s “Ark Project”, which is intended to secure a future for humanity, but is being opposed by the Human Liberation Front, and in particular Deia Chades. There’s also a clash between Olympus and another city-state, Poseidon, which confused the heck out of me, as in the previous version, Poseidon appeared to be a multinational conglomerate. Whatevs. To be honest, it would have been a bit of an improvement if I could have brought myself to care about this, or anything else presented here. Instead, I found myself largely uninterested in the watered-down version of Deunan which we got here – someone who seemed more concerned about getting in touch with her feelings than with kicking ass.

Dir: Takayuki Hamana
Star (voice): Maaya Sakamoto, Kōichi Yamadera, Mikako Takahashi, Hiro Shimono

Appleseed Ex Machina

  By

★★★½
“The Deunan wears Prada.”

I think this is probably my favourite of the various incarnations of Appleseed. It may not be the best characterization, the best animation, or the best plot. But I think in overall terms, the combination is the most successful. In all the others, you can typically point to one of those three areas as being at least somewhat deficient. Here, if none are outstanding, they’re all solid and competent. It may help that legendary Hong Kong director John Woo was one of the producers. If you didn’t know that, you could probably tell from the early scene in which Briareos crashes through a church’s stained-glass window, a gun blazing in each hand. “All that needs is some white doves in slow-mo,” I thought. And, lo, later on, the birds in question do appear – and are even necessary to the plot, which is probably more than Woo managed!

The story here begins with the latest in a series of terrorist attacks, carried out by cyborgs. It turns out they are not acting of their own free will, but are being “puppet mastered” into their actions. Worse, the human residents of Olympus now appear to be joining in, baffling Deunan (Kobayashio) and her colleagues in ESWAT. Viewers, however, will likely be quicker to figure out the cause there, given the rather obvious mentions of a hot new piece of wearable technology called Connexus, which simply everyone who is anyone is now sporting. Meanwhile, a new kind of soldier biodroid is being developed, basied on Briareos (Yamadera), designed to possess the talents of humans or cyborgs, but without the negative traits. After Briareos is injured, Deunan is partnered up with one, Tereus (Kishi). This freaks her out, because he looks just like Briareos, before his cybernetic upgrades. Meanwhile, Olympus leader Athena (Takashima) seeks to leverage the terrorist attacks to gain support for her plan to create a worldwide security network.

There’s a lot going here, yet the script manages to keep the elements clear and moving forward without confusion. There’s a sweet spot in SF between the simplistic and the over-complex, and this hit it better than most. The animation is a tad short, however. Weirdly, what stood out as defective was the hair, which didn’t move in the way it should. Either that, or I guess, after the apocalypse, hair lacquer is not in short supply. In general though, the technical aspects were competent enough and occasionally better than that. Perhaps due to Woo’s involvement, it feels a perfect candidate for a live-action adaptation, though the budget would need to be well into nine figures. I’d go with Ruby Rose as Deunan and Dave Bautista as Briareos. Change my mind. :)  Oh, and the tagline? Yeah, some of Deunan’s outfits in the film were indeed designed by Miuccia Prada. She has been running the family’s clothing company since 1978, and was a fan of the previous film. A very well-dressed action heroine indeed…

Dir: Shinji Aramaki
Star (voice):  Ai Kobayashi, Kōichi Yamadera, Gara Takashima, Yūji Kishi