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.

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.

My 3 AM thoughts on this 3-star movie that I watched 3 months ago.
This review is written out of boredom.
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I randomly got the urge to watch "Hellsing Abridged" (not to be confused with (Hellsing Ultimate), and during that scene in Seras' backstory, I got reminded of this movie's beginning.

So, in the most generic cyberpunk-ish dystopian advanced civilization, we follow this particular big shot with an underaged girl wrapped in his arms on a perfectly dark night in a perfectly isolated automobile in a perfectly isolated woodland, doing what the night asks except it's far from romantic. After a few minutes of doing his _thing_, the ... guy gets out of the car, locks the girl in, and then... BAM! The car explodes after a very graphic depiction of a young helpless girl frantically fighting to rescue her broken life.
This is insignificant. What counts is that an unaffiliated third party comes to her aid, despite the fact that he had been closely studying everything prior to the explosion with his heat vision goggles. They only save her psychologically by implanting her with an artificial fiber body, which completely messes up her mental state and nearly kills her, due to some law that allows the police to resuscitate the criminal witness. Now, this befuddled cyborg must defend her 'innocence,' as the mistake known as "Her Past" haunts her on both a societal and psychological level. Fortunately, she is being supervised by a professor com' scientist com' gambler and an AI resembling a rat, but how much can they handle this psychologically unstable cyborg while evading a hunter appointed by the villain?

TL;DR,
What if Batou was actually a villain and Kusanagi was actually a confused teenage girl in an edgy Ghost in the Shell rip-off?

One clear thing while watching the movie is the over-saturated colors. The entire movie is bright and shiny everywhere and every time, which is both a plus and a drawback. Plus, in the sense, it's ✨bright✨, and drawback in the sense, that it's so bright that it makes me avert my eyes. There are, however, some slick gun animations with some good camera usage and choreography. This is something that appears throughout the trilogy, so if anything, it gets entertaining eventually. Why eventually though?

Because the story is just edgy and pretentious (This goes down the lane as you progress into the trilogy). Not even in the entertainingly edgy but in the most boring sense. Like the court where our mentally complicated victim can only answer in a Yes/No/No Comment throughout the trial, or the whole irrelevant gambling plot that happens in movie 2, or whatever the fuck happens in movie 3. The story progressively degrades from being a mildly mind-bending character study, into edgy bullshit drama. As a trilogy it really fails, because you don't feel like you watched a coherent story unraveling character pasts or decisions, but 3 separate films with 3 different plot lines got superficially intertwined. You are better off spending those 3 hours on Ghost in the Shell 1 and 2, even as a rewatch it would be a better experience than this.

While 2 & 3 movies are definitely not worth the time, the first compression, however, is definitely worth experiencing because of this mildly mind-bending (I'm using this word for the 'Intelligence' effect. Don't take it too literally) character study between Balot and Oeufcoque. _Balotto_ is a confused cyborg who already has a damaged mind and past as a human being. Oeufcoque, while being an AI, shows genuine human emotion upon hearing this emotionless girl asking for its love, a cute & tiny rat-looking AI's love, and the movie does a surprisingly good job by not making this weird but making their interactions, endearing.

But that's all the credit I give for the movie in the writing department. Anything and everything else is just a poorly written edge fest with very little damn giving to portraying themes or invoking drama.
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Who should watch this?

If you want Ghost in the Shell but edgy, then watch the entire trilogy.
If you only want good parts and don't want to waste your time, then just watch movie 1 and leave it there. Or
If you want to see a pretense adult film with an overly sexual animation of a r*** victim, then go ahead and satisfy your kinks for all I care.
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Not a good trilogy but not a bad introduction.

This si a review for all 3 mardock scramble movies, and not just the first one.

Reading the synopsis of this anime may fool you into thinking that you're going to watch an anime with ton of action in it, perhaps with violence and gore. And cyberpunk. Basically, you'd expect something similar to Psycho-Pass or maybe Ghost in the Shell... that kind of thing.

And you would be wrong. This anime does have very well done action scenes, but mostly it is a rather slow and rather sad story about its characters, their inner demons and psychological troubles.

It also does have a problem of never explaining ... most of the futuristic setting...

Anyway, detailed breakdown below:

Story: 6/10:
It is interesting, but it has that slight problem where it never properly explains fairly big details of its futuristic setting, like certain powers characters use.

Overall it is a fairly slow/methodolodical exploration of characters and their troubles and their demons and "skeletons in the closet".

I found the 2nd movie to be weaker than 1st and the 3rd, and found some aspects of the story a bit forced, but maybe it is just me.

Art: 6/10:
It is good, without chibis in it. However, it uses cg environments and cg objects like cars and those stand out and are easily noticeable. It would've looked better if this problem was addressed.

Sound: 6/10:
Sound does its job, and has nice tunes, but nothing outstanding. I felt like voice acting on some side characters could've been better. There was a disconnect between certain voices and certain characters.

Character: 6/10:
I found characters to be a bit flat, and interactions with them sometimes headed into harder to believe territory. However, there were no obvious cliches and stereotypes, and characters resembled real people. More or less. I think that conversations between protagonist and protagonist's "partner" were done the best.

Enjoyment: 6/10:
Overall I liked it. It is not what I expected, but it was fairly well done.

Overall: 6/10:
It is worth watching, but I wouldn't call it s a "must see" anime. it is mostly a character-centered show, that could perhaps tell a bit more about the world portrayed in it.

Worth checking out.