The setting is the only interesting thing I can find in the whole film. It has to do with a future society where peace has been established and the time when people had to kill other people, or even animals for food, is now just a thing of history. There are some though who still commit atrocious acts; they wear masks and are called wolves. So basically we have the heroes, who grew up in a constantly monitored, secured and almost robotically emotionless world full of fancy hi-teck gadgets, suddenly being pitted against a violent society of unregistered people and murderous beasts from a world that was supposed to now be long gone. It is interesting to see these opposite ways of life in a conflict.
And this is where all the positives stop since all the rest is one big mess. Here is the horrid black list of the things I disliked.
1) So here you are watching this film waiting for cool stuff to happen and in just a few minutes WHAM the harsh reality hits you in the face. All the main characters are part of the plague that kills modern anime: Moe schoolgirls. Damn what a drag, they killed the mood. Sure, having cute / frail / innocent girls going through an emotional hell before getting all horrified and bloody may sound like an instant hook for most casual viewers but it has been done SO many times that now it’s just ridiculous. Plus, the characterization is almost always close to zero as moe is nothing but simplistic personalities and squeaky voices. And indeed, with only one movie worth of duration none of the characters have the time to be anything other than generic moe schoolgirls. They don’t even change clothes when they are not at school for Pete’s sake.
2) The foreground artwork, and especially the character designs, is lazy. Apart from being mostly overused caricatures of schoolgirls, there is also very little to no details on them. The visual effects on computers and gadgets are cool but the characters have no interesting uniforms, no complicating facial structure and barely any shading or lightening on their bodies. That makes them look like a lifeless-looking gag manga. I mean just look at those lazily drawn faces!
3) The soundtrack is full of girly J-pop that nobody will give a damn about. Where is my epic chorus / synthesizer music you bastards? This is a sci-fi movie!
4) The dialogues felt really artificial. The moe girls constantly repeat the questions as if they don’t understand anything and need to spend most of the duration in breaking the fourth wall just to explain how some common-knowledge issues to them need elaboration. It felt totally retarded. And sure, it fits to have a bunch of oblivious cute girls being gaga with everything but it doesn’t make the plot any better. Here you have an elaborate sci-fi setting that would normally be full of complicating notions and what you get is a bunch of dumb girls going “Duh, food? Duh, mystery? Duh, hacking? Duh, kidnap?” For 90 minutes!
5) The plot is retarded. You just have no idea why something happens the way it does and not in a more logical way.
- People are kidnapped and the police don’t even know they are missing for weeks, despite having security cameras in every room and road, and despite everybody having a GPS signal on them. You would at least assume the teachers or the parents or the eye witnesses would report to the police how some of the people they know haven’t shown up for weeks or that they saw them being attacked. And no, you get squat! How the devil is this society working if they have so many security systems and yet they can’t do the simplest thing? How did they even reach to such a blissful state if a common kidnaper can do anything he likes and nobody will report him?
- A bunch of dumb schoolgirls who are bored of their boring controlled lives are otherwise outsmarting the system and deal with all sorts of mysteries and criminals by just walking around and making a few simple questions. You can’t believe how retarded it feels to have such characters being fifty times more effective than the otherwise awesomely controlled status quo. And as usual, you have no bloody idea of why they never inform the police or anyone else for what they discover that can endanger the lives of millions.
- You also have no idea of what is going on with the storyline. You see a girl being attacked but saved at the last moment. Yet in the exact next scene, she is kidnapped for no obvious reason. And when they finally save her for the second time, they let her recover in an open remote bedroom for a week, while they are practicing a teen band song for kicks. Ain’t they scared in the least for what the hell just happened? Why didn’t they tell anyone about it? What are the police doing all this time? How did the movie swift from horror / sci-fi / mystery to a fluffy K-On clone? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Wait, now the girl is attacked for the third time? So much for being more cautious you dumb girl! And then more attacks and stuff that make no sense. I can go on forever with how terrible the storyboard is. Especially the ending where the motives of the villains are revealed. God, what a shitty asspull was that?
- What is even dumber than all that is how the whole fuss was resolved by just one character who was just killing anyone getting in its way. Everybody else was just a stunt and eventually useless to the plot; all it took was to take a knife and start killing anything that moved. Thank you very much for the cheap way out and the trashing of the rest of the already generic cast. And the funniest part? Said character was not even the protagonist. The protagonist was in the contrary the most useless of all the moe girls who did absolutely nothing other than crying and running away in the whole damn film.
One of the shittiest anime movies of recent times and a shame to the already large bad roster of I.G. titles.
And now for some excused scorings.
ART SECTION: 7/10
General Artwork 1/2 (lazy for an I.G. level of production)
Character Figures 0/2 (generic and lazily drawn)
Backgrounds 2/2 (fitting with the feeling of the series)
Animation 2/2 (ok for a movie format)
Visual Effects 2/2 (funky sci-fi visuals)
SOUND SECTION: 4/10
Voice Acting 1/3 (retarded moe dialogues)
Music Themes 1/4 (out of place J-pop crap)
Sound Effects 2/3 (ok I guess)
STORY SECTION: 4/10
Premise 2/2 (interesting)
Pacing 0/2 (sloppy)
Complexity 2/2 (rich context)
Plausibility 0/2 (none)
Conclusion 0/2 (anti-climactic asspull)
CHARACTER SECTION: 4/10
Presence 1/2 (generic)
Personality 1/2 (cheesy)
Backdrop 1/2 (generic and simplistic but it’s there)
Development 0/2 (non-existent or messy)
Catharsis 1/2 (overblown but it’s there)
VALUE SECTION: 2/10
Historical Value 0/3 (none)
Rewatchability 0/3 (no reason to bother again with this crap)
Memorability 2/4 (cool enough concept to remember but the rest of it is crap)
ENJOYMENT SECTION: 1/10
Art 0/1 (looks lazy)
Sound 0/2 (sounds out of place)
Story 1/3 (cool concept, shitty presentation)
Characters 0/4 (generic and lame)
VERDICT: 3.5/10
