Armitage III: Dual-Matrix

What Happens when a sequel loses the thread of the original story? To answer that question, you only have to look at this movie. The movie is an example of when they decide to make a sequel to a cyberpunk movie, influenced by the mainstream (IE GITS or the Matrix) and completely lose the 'punk' aspects.

Story

The story itself is a complete reversal of the original/Polymatrix. Now, Earth (or at least a part of it) wants the Third reproduction capabilities, when the original the Earth wanted all Thirds destroyed BECAUSE of those abilities. Add in the go-nowhere/excuse subplot of the Robot Rights bill simply to get ... Ross and Yoko on Earth, and you get a clunky, non-cohesive story. Not to mention Yoko's eidetic memory.

Art

The art, to be fair, is decent, but lacks the punch of the original as well. This version loses on the shading, favoring instead somewhat brighter colors. So decent, but not the best.

Sound

Going full cyber instead of cyberpunk, the music reflects the nature of the film; muted, letting the action and interaction speak for itself. The voices are well done, for the most part fitting the characters perfectly.

Character

To be honest, the only reason this scores so high is because they didn't completely lose the elements of Ross and Naomi from the first film; they managed to retain their fighting skills, even if there are some asspulls.

In the end, i didn't enjoy this film; while okay or average, as a followup to the original it falls completely flat. This movie does not harmonize with the first at all, ignoring the tightly done story of the first and rewriting the world.

Armitage III Dual Matrix

Dual Matrix feels very much like one step forward and two steps back compared to the original OVA. While on the technical side it's a large improvement I don't think there's any more fun to be had here than with the OVA.

Art/animation: I'd say this is where most of the drastic improvements took place with visual style of the anime becoming a lot more consistent. From the way the world looks to characters themselves it feels much more solid and defined. On its own it is not that amazing either since it's just a bog standard sci-fi affair with tightly packed skyscrapers ... and lots of metal and electronics everywhere. However it's still a decent looker, less jank than in the predecessor and better shot composition on average as well as cool color schemes here in there that are more in line with what you'd expect from cyberpunk. The gore aspect is gone by the way so you expected exploding hands and oceans of blood like in the OVA then you'll have to kill that murderboner for now.

Story: Things somehow have gotten worse and I'm not talking about the events of the movie. The writing in the original show wasn't much to look at either and I can't exactly call that one self-aware but at least they didn't shove it in your face that much. Not the case with Dual Matrix. It feels as if someone on the team thought they've really got something going there and they put a lot more focus on making sure you understand how complex this whole conflict is. In reality it hardly is. I put so much effort to get invested into the story and soak up everything they feed out to the viewer but it's hardly worth it. To begin with we're working with wooden characters that feel less than one dimensional, like hell, I can't even see what Armitage is supposed to be, at times she's a cute mom robot that goes out at night to protect her kind from injustice and takes it all with a great sense of duty and responsibility, other times you see her casually play with people that try to kill her and smirks at the danger ahead. It's a combination of this ally of justice and battle hungry battle robot that's doesn't make sense and is never elaborated upon. When you have a such clash of personality you can't just leave it out like it doesn't matter cause it doesn't fit. To me it just seems like at certain moments the action sensibilities take over and instead of crafting a proper story with characters you can care for they thought "what would happen in a badass action movie" and tried to replicate it without much success. Another moment that made me think this was when Armitage jumps through a window, scans what's ahead of her and we see a whole bunch of armed robots. The way it's presented you'd expect a cool, fast paced action scene to flow from here but instead she just shoots two robots out of a billion and runs through gunfire to elevator and just leaves, ok, cool, that's some badass action you got there. But at least we get to see Armitage fight the same two clones over and over for like half an hour, that couldn't have been shortened in favor of some variety. So yeah, characters suck. Especially the main villain cause it's just a guy who was in the first part for like 4 minutes and doesn't get any development at all. It's just a mess, it would take twice the runtime of the movie to go over each individual element and explain why it's so bad.

Music: Minor improvement over the original. Even though it's a infinitely more cheesy it's also a lot more fitting to the occasion this time around. That's about it, despite it all it's not memorable in any way and just crosses the line of serviceable.

Directing: Not much of an improvement in this category either. I'll commend that they finally started kinda caring about color direction in a sci-fi title, flow of action is a lot more coherent and shots on average are composed better but it's still a mess when it comes to pacing and how much time needs to be spent on something important vs shots of characters looking at things.

Fun factor: Unless you're some hardcore Armitage fan just pass it by. It's a meh action flick and it's an even more underwhelming sci-fi movie. Your time would be better spent watching one of the countless sci-fi titles that executes everything better.