The story isn't overly unique, think The Matrix mixed with Elysium. Humanity stretched Earth to its very limit with overpopulation and global warming, so much so numerous different plans were made for the continuation of mankind. One of these was a giant orbital space station where humans would be scanned onto a huge computer system and live in a virtual world. This however created a cast system between these digital humans who see themselves as the next step in evolution, where they can experience anything they want in the virtual world whilst the humans on the surface are struggling to survive and get by.
When the digital world is hacked by a connection relay on Earth, the elite ruling class on the space station send numerous agents down to Earth to track down the hacker. The agents are all young, attractive women in skimpy costumes, which is a bit odd. I wasn't sure if the movie was trying to make a message since the three ruling members of the digital world are men who gave themselves avatars resembling gods and they made their security forces all hot young women, but the movie reveals itself to not really be that clever.
The main character Balzac is a likable enough character, a very cliched character who has never experienced "real life" and has to be shown what it is to be human by her actual human helper "Dingo" who is the best character in the movie. Balzac's story isn't overly complicated, to catch the hacker they have to go "off-grid" and disconnect from the space station entirely, leaving her with none of her advanced equipment or backup so she has to struggle to be human for a change. Her character is quite inconsistent though. When she's first introduced on the space station, she's calm, cool and seemingly quite reserved but when she goes on her mission she's very loud, easily flustered and whiny (which is weird since she says "I do my job, I have never complained"). I then wasn't sure if this was because she purposefully made her body 16 so maybe her mentality was changed too but once again, I think the movie isn't that clever and instead it is just for blatant TNA which is pretty off-putting. For her also being made out to be a great agent and very intelligent, she is then repeatedly confused and caught off guard by numerous things that should have been blatantly obvious, like if the hacker can monitor all of the digital world, why does she think it'd be a good idea to stay connected to it the entire time whilst hunting them?
The mission is over pretty quickly, finding the hacker and having to deal with the knowledge that the digital world isn't all good because it also has a cast system where if you aren't useful, you get less "memory" allocated to you, meaning you can't do much as a digital avatar and even have worse models. The movie doesn't explain what being useful is though in a digital world where everything is provided for you. Balzac works because she's a security agent, but what's the point of security agents if the rulers have total control over everyone and can kill them instantly with just a thought? What does everyone else do? They're hardly builders or farmers or anything along those lines. So how is your "worth" determined?
It might seem like I have a lot of complaints, but I did enjoy the movie as a character and action romp. If you actually think about the plot or the world, it doesn't make much sense at all.
The ending in particular just felt weak. It is one of those anime where I could easily imagine you thinking "Well, what was the point of this movie?". It suffers from being a movie where a series could have paced it out better, giving it time to expand on its lore but with its run time, everything just feels crammed in to get the story out the door.
