Appleseed Review
Now there may be people out there who haven't seen the (relatively) new Japanese Appleseed movie, there may be some who couldn't give a stuff, there are undoubtedly some who won't know what the hell I'm talking about. But where everyone else has been raving about Batman Begins or the prospects of the new Superman movie, Appleseed means a hell of a lot more to me, so if I don't write the review, no one will. And yeah, if you haven't seen it and might yet do so -- Spoiler Warning!
Okay, Appleseed is the most prolifically written-in world of Masamune Shirow, who perhaps more famously created Ghost in the Shell. I'm not huge on all manga, but I love Shirow. I don't even agree with all of his ideas. In fact, some strong disagreements with his notions of artificial intelligence in Ghost in the Shell gave at least some of the inspiration for me to create Cassandra Kresnov. But even when presenting a (in my opinion) flawed idea, Shirow has style -- not only is his drawing amazing, his technology awesome and his pages erupting with kinetic energy, but his characters and dialogue are great too. Not many of the hard-technology manga movies seem to pull off character and dialogue at all -- but the original Ghost in the Shell did, kind of, and I was hoping Appleseed might too.
Sadly, they get it all wrong. For starters, the characters' faces are wooden, almost expressionless -- while Shirow's characters are wonderfully expressive on the page. This seems to sum up the attitude of the film toward its characters -- don't worry about who they are, just marvel at their amazing high-kicks. The most fun thing about the star of Shirow's drawn Appleseed, Deunan Knute, is that she's not just superwoman -- she's also a lunatic. Or to be more precise, she's a self-centered, immature, hot-tempered, highly-strung super-brat. All of which, somehow, only makes her more endearing, especially when this very flawed individual does arrive at her occasional moment of great emotional revelation or sympathy for a fellow human being. It means more, coming from Deunan, because we don't always expect it. Because Deunan, of course, is rather like us -- she exhibits all the behavior that our mothers tried hard to stamp out of us when we were little. She does all the stuff we'd love to do, if polite society hadn't told us we shouldn't. Interesting, huh, the recurrence of these character traits not only in Shirow's work, but in other manga too -- in Japan, the least uninhibited society on the planet? You'd think these manga artists were using characters like Deunan as a subconscious pressure-release valve or something...
The movie does the worst thing you can do to Deunan -- by not bothering to develop her fully, they take the easy road, and make her reasonable. Reasonable Deunan is like Indiana Jones with no sense of humor. The one real reaction she got from the cinema audience at my screening was in the training scene where she's knocking off opponents five at-a-time, then drawing little crosses on her arm to keep track -- this scene is taken from Shirow's Appleseed Three. As in the manga, Briareos gets mad at her for making her future partners look stupid. Then paths diverge -- reasonable movie Deunan gets angry at him, for reasonable reasons, because it's a reasonable thing to do. Manga Deunan gets upset that Briareos is upset, and scurries like a scolded little girl to apologise to everyone, then begs him not to hate her anymore. The girl's a little unstable, and Shirow teases her about it like an affectionate uncle to a troublesome niece. But reasonable movie-Deunan becomes Godlike, perfect, gorgeous, so high on her pedestal that she can do no wrong... which doesn't work, because a) it's boring, b) internal contradictions are the soul of drama, and c) flaws are funny. There's no laughs in the movie. Which is sad, because Shirow's Deunan is a hoot. And Shirow's Hitomi is funny too, and Briareos is the king of one liners.
Plot, dialogue, character... it's all connected, in all films or books. Make a bad choice with one, and it can ruin all the others. Here, the exposition is terrible. It's one thing to have a complicated plot -- if that plot leads to high drama and great action, that's fine. But here, the complicated plot is mostly explained and in parts resolved by people standing around talking about it. Exposition-through-drama, otherwise known as 'show, don't tell' is one of the toughest things to do in writing, film or books. Here, they get it very wrong, leading to a very technical attitude to the plot, where all the dots must be connected, including all those dots the audience don't give a stuff about (most of them, I think). Shirow's manga are also very complicated, and often hard to understand, but that's because he doesn't try to join all the dots -- he touches on a clever idea, and leaves it largely unexplained. That idea then hangs there, unresolved, and can be revisited in subsequent readings, which is why I can still reread Shirow manga many times, and have a different experience each time.
In this movie, they try to make everything watertight, which takes an awful amount of pointless effort. It also kills the dialogue, because no one ever says anything that's not an artifact of plot construction. Or in other words, no one is ever just themselves, no one swears, jokes, says something stupid for the hell of it. In Shirow's Appleseed Two, Hitomi and Yoshi are sitting at a bar, pondering the big questions of bioroid/human existence, and Hitomi wonders how to quantify happiness.
"Deunan," she asks as Deunan arrives. "What does happiness mean?"
"Me," says Deunan. "It means me."
I love that, because it's short, sweet, doesn't make literal sense, but you know exactly what she means while learning something very important about Deunan. Also it demonstrates what I said about Shirow purposely not resolving open-ended questions -- the following frame in the manga is of Hitomi and Yoshi, both a little drunk, staring off into space once Deunan has left and puzzling over what the hell she meant. Some themes are best tackled ambiguously. If this movie had taken that approach, it would have freed up so much wasted space, including the wasted characters. Get one thing wrong, you ruin all the rest.
Having said all that, the action sequences are amazing, the mecha fantastic, and the weaponry phenomenal. Unfortunately, the plot and dialogue seems to have been written by people more interested in the workings of heavy-caliber chain guns.
Okay, Appleseed is the most prolifically written-in world of Masamune Shirow, who perhaps more famously created Ghost in the Shell. I'm not huge on all manga, but I love Shirow. I don't even agree with all of his ideas. In fact, some strong disagreements with his notions of artificial intelligence in Ghost in the Shell gave at least some of the inspiration for me to create Cassandra Kresnov. But even when presenting a (in my opinion) flawed idea, Shirow has style -- not only is his drawing amazing, his technology awesome and his pages erupting with kinetic energy, but his characters and dialogue are great too. Not many of the hard-technology manga movies seem to pull off character and dialogue at all -- but the original Ghost in the Shell did, kind of, and I was hoping Appleseed might too.
Sadly, they get it all wrong. For starters, the characters' faces are wooden, almost expressionless -- while Shirow's characters are wonderfully expressive on the page. This seems to sum up the attitude of the film toward its characters -- don't worry about who they are, just marvel at their amazing high-kicks. The most fun thing about the star of Shirow's drawn Appleseed, Deunan Knute, is that she's not just superwoman -- she's also a lunatic. Or to be more precise, she's a self-centered, immature, hot-tempered, highly-strung super-brat. All of which, somehow, only makes her more endearing, especially when this very flawed individual does arrive at her occasional moment of great emotional revelation or sympathy for a fellow human being. It means more, coming from Deunan, because we don't always expect it. Because Deunan, of course, is rather like us -- she exhibits all the behavior that our mothers tried hard to stamp out of us when we were little. She does all the stuff we'd love to do, if polite society hadn't told us we shouldn't. Interesting, huh, the recurrence of these character traits not only in Shirow's work, but in other manga too -- in Japan, the least uninhibited society on the planet? You'd think these manga artists were using characters like Deunan as a subconscious pressure-release valve or something...
The movie does the worst thing you can do to Deunan -- by not bothering to develop her fully, they take the easy road, and make her reasonable. Reasonable Deunan is like Indiana Jones with no sense of humor. The one real reaction she got from the cinema audience at my screening was in the training scene where she's knocking off opponents five at-a-time, then drawing little crosses on her arm to keep track -- this scene is taken from Shirow's Appleseed Three. As in the manga, Briareos gets mad at her for making her future partners look stupid. Then paths diverge -- reasonable movie Deunan gets angry at him, for reasonable reasons, because it's a reasonable thing to do. Manga Deunan gets upset that Briareos is upset, and scurries like a scolded little girl to apologise to everyone, then begs him not to hate her anymore. The girl's a little unstable, and Shirow teases her about it like an affectionate uncle to a troublesome niece. But reasonable movie-Deunan becomes Godlike, perfect, gorgeous, so high on her pedestal that she can do no wrong... which doesn't work, because a) it's boring, b) internal contradictions are the soul of drama, and c) flaws are funny. There's no laughs in the movie. Which is sad, because Shirow's Deunan is a hoot. And Shirow's Hitomi is funny too, and Briareos is the king of one liners.
Plot, dialogue, character... it's all connected, in all films or books. Make a bad choice with one, and it can ruin all the others. Here, the exposition is terrible. It's one thing to have a complicated plot -- if that plot leads to high drama and great action, that's fine. But here, the complicated plot is mostly explained and in parts resolved by people standing around talking about it. Exposition-through-drama, otherwise known as 'show, don't tell' is one of the toughest things to do in writing, film or books. Here, they get it very wrong, leading to a very technical attitude to the plot, where all the dots must be connected, including all those dots the audience don't give a stuff about (most of them, I think). Shirow's manga are also very complicated, and often hard to understand, but that's because he doesn't try to join all the dots -- he touches on a clever idea, and leaves it largely unexplained. That idea then hangs there, unresolved, and can be revisited in subsequent readings, which is why I can still reread Shirow manga many times, and have a different experience each time.
In this movie, they try to make everything watertight, which takes an awful amount of pointless effort. It also kills the dialogue, because no one ever says anything that's not an artifact of plot construction. Or in other words, no one is ever just themselves, no one swears, jokes, says something stupid for the hell of it. In Shirow's Appleseed Two, Hitomi and Yoshi are sitting at a bar, pondering the big questions of bioroid/human existence, and Hitomi wonders how to quantify happiness.
"Deunan," she asks as Deunan arrives. "What does happiness mean?"
"Me," says Deunan. "It means me."
I love that, because it's short, sweet, doesn't make literal sense, but you know exactly what she means while learning something very important about Deunan. Also it demonstrates what I said about Shirow purposely not resolving open-ended questions -- the following frame in the manga is of Hitomi and Yoshi, both a little drunk, staring off into space once Deunan has left and puzzling over what the hell she meant. Some themes are best tackled ambiguously. If this movie had taken that approach, it would have freed up so much wasted space, including the wasted characters. Get one thing wrong, you ruin all the rest.
Having said all that, the action sequences are amazing, the mecha fantastic, and the weaponry phenomenal. Unfortunately, the plot and dialogue seems to have been written by people more interested in the workings of heavy-caliber chain guns.
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