Ranked #741

Mardock Scramble: The First Compression

Short and sweet:

Story - Very interesting, but suffered from pacing issues. It moved wayyy too fast and didn't explain what was going on--or why--very well. Then again, some people may like this kind of vagueness that puts the jobs of interpretation and filling in the gaps on the viewer. If they had tacked an extra 20-30 minutes onto it, they could've SLOWED THE HELL DOWN and taken their time.

Art - Incredible, clean, and beautiful, except I'm not a fan of the grain layering they used over the duration of the film. It was different, but not my taste. Watching it on an HD-TV greatly reduces its gravity, so I recommend that.

Sound - Great sound effects, excellent voice acting (both English and Japanese). But there wasn't a lot of music--and when there was, it didn't stand out very much. Their take on "Amazing Grace" at the end sounded really nice, but wasn't appropriate whatsoever for the mood of the ending.

Characters - The two mains were very well-written and interesting. Balot's backstory was painted very vividly. Her actions are very appropriate for what she's been through. Oeufcocque has an intriguingly quirky personality, which is interesting to see when watching them interact. The rest of the characters, however, are sadly boring and underdeveloped--even Dr. Easter and Shell (the villain). Hopefully this changes over the course of the next two films.

All in all, it's definitely a fun watch worthy of multiple viewings both for enjoyment, and to help yourself understand the story. It's graphic and brutally honest, depicting the world as it truly is. Choice scenes of a nude Balot that would normally be taken as fanservice simply cannot be seen as such--given the situations in which they occur: her being used by men. Looking forward to the next installment. Too bad it was so short.

*Be advised: The sex scenes and nudity are censored in R1 DVD release, and a few scenes were inexplicably removed. Just a word of warning if you're looking to buy the North American version. read more

This install­ment of Mar­dock Scramble is the first in what’s planned to be a 3-part series. In it, a teen­age pros­ti­tute is killed by the man who took care of her, but she’s brought back to life by some magical sci­ence to try get revenge on her killers. She’s given a robotic body, lots of skin tight cloth­ing and a highly intel­li­gent golden mouse who can trans­form into whatever he wants, nor­mally a gun of some sort.

It’s hard to talk about Mar­dock Scramble without giv­ing out some plot set­ting spoil­ers. People might say that descrip­tions of the plot aren’t spoil­ers at all, but it does seem a shame to hurt one of the few things this movie actu­ally does very well. The expos­i­tion, often a clunky and tedi­ous part of a movie, was revealed in a gradual course of exchanges between the female lead, Balot, and her mouse sidekick, Eufcoque. Asides from reveal­ing how the world works and what the extents of Balot’s and Eufcoque’s powers are, it also builds up the rela­tion­ship between the two in one of the most strangely charm­ing duos I’ve ever seen. Balot doesn’t exactly think straight, hardly sur­pris­ing given her past, and abuses her powers for vari­ous reas­ons. Eufcoque doesn’t think like a human, see­ing as he’s a mouse and everything, but his mind works off a logic that hauls in Balot and builds a trust between the two. Using the other as a spring­board for fur­ther explor­a­tion, the movie excels in the exchanges between the two that make up about half of the movie.

I did say that this was one of the things that it actu­ally did well, which implies that the movie per­formed less favour­able in other areas. This movie has a lot of grand ideas about how great it is and how it’s explor­ing themes of depres­sion and sexual desires, but most of it is done in such awful fash­ion that parts of the movie come out as unin­ten­tional humour. There’s a group of under­ground sur­geons towards the end of the movie with a taste for attach­ing parts of human bod­ies to them­selves. One guy has eyes all over his body, which was prob­ably sup­posed to be intim­id­at­ing but really just looked stu­pid. There was another guy with breasts sewn all over his body like that ghost from the Fat Stock­ing epis­ode of Panty and Stock­ing. The rest all equally looked like char­ac­ters Apo­ca­lypse Zero. As for the dis­turb­ingly lit­eral nick­name of their leader, Pussy­hands, the less said the better.

These char­ac­ters were prob­ably sup­posed to sym­bol­ise humans liv­ing out their sexual fantas­ies, but like much of the rest of the fore­shad­ow­ing and imagery, it mainly res­ul­ted with scenes in vari­ous degrees of clunky or stu­pid. A bunch of the char­ac­ters are given names related to eggs, such as Boiled and Shell, prob­ably meant to sym­bol­ise birth of a new life or whatever, but that was rather eye-roll indu­cing, like call­ing the viol­ent vil­lain in your show Vicious or some­thing. There were some more stand­ard prob­lems, such as lots of cryptic con­ver­sa­tions that failed to grab the interest, or over­bear­ing level of mad­ness they gave char­ac­ters that didn’t fit well into the story. Oh, and play­ing Amaz­ing Grace as your end­ing song was pretty eye-rolling too.

Not all of the sym­bol­ism failed, to be fair, the rela­tion­ship between Balot and Eufcoque being the best example. Heck, any­thing good about this movie came about when it was just those two together. The best scene in the movie was one where Balot asked Eufcoque to love her, with the golden mouse’s stuttered retort being that he wasn’t cap­able of lov­ing as a mouse and that “I can’t just turn into a male human in order to love you”. The scene, asides from reveal­ing a slightly messed up side to Balot’s mind, also shook Eufcoque and revealed we wasn’t quite as assured and logic­ally per­fect as earlier scenes had you believe.

(As an aside, I kept expect­ing Balot to turn Eufcoque into a dildo. That wasn’t just a dirty mind at play in a highly sexu­al­ised anime. Balot kept going on about how she just wanted someone to love her, with the only way she knew love in her depraved life was through sex, but Eufcoque kept point­ing out that he was just a ves­sel that was incap­able of love and that he was just a tool to pre­tend she was being loved. See where I’m going with this? Con­trast this to our good friend Mr.Pussyhands, who quite lit­er­ally has sex with his hand. I would not be that sur­prised if Eufcoque becomes mas­turb­a­tion aid at some point in the later movies)

Again, this movie only ever good when it was just inter­ac­tions between the main char­ac­ter and her mouse sidekick, the rest of the movie being dumb, some­times pain­fully so. Thank­fully a lot of the movie was just inter­ac­tions between the main two, which is enough to keep my interest to watch the later install­ments. But it’s not enough for me to recom­mend it either. read more