Blame! looks the part, certainly. In fact, it looks and sounds brilliant. Based in a desolate, underground city, it will never look as interesting as Ghost in the Shell's New Port City or the orange hue of Deus Ex. But the mixture of post-apocalyptic dystopia and cyberpunk dystopia come together, with a surprising amount of sci-fi technobabble backing it up, and create more than an interesting-enough world to spend a couple of hours in. Perhaps a franchise, if only there was better writing.
That's the crux of the problem here. Kiri is the uninteresting, mildly androgynous man-of-few-words dressed in black that you've seen dug up and refitted for generations, only this time the twist that breaks him from stereotype is... awkward line delivery. Having the lead badass talk a word-a-minute in gruff whispers is bizarre, to say the least.
The more human characters represent the kind you'd see lining filler episodes in a longer running series - that is to say, archetypal. They give us vague subplots such as hinting at an attempted romance with all of three lines and a caring sister, but unfortunately the time just isn't put in to make these stories believable. The subplots are so time-strained that they are meaningless, and robs the film of feeling, and its not like there is even witty dialogue to push it along.
Robotic scripts and cold characters aren't a rarity for the genre. Serial Experiments Lain and Ghost in the Shell get through their runtimes without one-liners and character-drama because they have something interesting to say, but I honestly can't say that Blame! even had a philosophical or thematic aspect. At its best it wanted to be a tense action film, but didn't have the style to back it up, and the story took the most barebones approach to action-adventure that could be mustered up, with inexcusably vague exposition as to why we moved from point-to-point.
Even when the hero is facing off against an impressive foe in a ring of flames, with dramatic music blaring loudly and lasers firing off in odd directions, there was no substance. The designs were interesting, with guns shooting spears and the badguys crawling around on all-fours with creepy masks, but I was still scratching my head. I'm not sure why this film got put together. It was quite pointless other than looking for something to watch popcorn to, and even then you could do better.
