Appleseed

Both movies are trying to explore religious and philosophical themes, and yet the evidence of the superficiality of the filmmakers’ knowledge in these areas is evident in many places, such as when the first movie begins with a quote from “Revelations 12:4” (with a superfluous ‘s’), or when we get a close-up of Briareos’ arm and read what seems to have been an unsuccessful attempt to render “Cogito ergo sum” in Greek letters. Nevertheless, the questions the film tackles are indeed interesting and relevant, and the impressive artwork and aesthetic content alone makes it worth seeing the movies. If you are a fan of sci-fi in general, and in particular if you liked The Matrix and/or Ghost in the Shell, then you really should see Appleseed if you haven’t already.

Some of the more interesting questions the movies explore relate to the consequences of integrating machine and human. In the movies, as one expects will also be the case in real life at some point in the future, machine supplements and replacement parts are used on people who are injured. We thus see a number of cybernetically-enhanced individuals on the police force, but not everyone has such enhancements, and so clearly they such technology is being used to save the lives and functionality of the injured, and not for the sake of enhancement alone. Being part machine has its drawbacks and not only advantages. One of the key moral questions often discussed in our time is the appropriateness of genetic and technological enhancement to improve humanity, rather than merely correct natural errors. And Appleseed explores notions of humanity living in harmony with and cooperating with computers and clones in ways that other films that I’ve watched do not.

We also get to explore a question that the Star Wars movies raise. If Anakin had ended up a cyborg but had never turned to the dark side, or had turned back and been reconciled to Padme, could she have loved him in this “taller, darker and arguably less handsome” form? We find Deunan Knute and Briareos Hecatonchires exploring their relationship through just such a situation (and, by the way, the name of the latter suggests that the filmmakers knew Classics even if they were sketchy on religion an philosophy).

One message of the movies is that humanity has a penchant for pushing itself to the brink of self-annihilation, but it also has a penchant for finding at the brink a way to avoid cataclysm. Ex Machina suggests at one point that all “Edens” are susceptible to serpents, but also that, having lost Eden, that doesn’t mean humanity should give up on survival.