楽園追放 -Expelled From Paradise-

RAKUEN TSUIHOU: EXPELLED FROM PARADISE

MOVIE

MOVIE
Dubbed
SOURCE
ORIGINAL
RELEASE
November 15, 2014
LENGTH
103 min

DESCRIPTION

Angela Balzac is an agent at the space station DEVA, whose inhabitants have no physical bodies, their minds digitized and processed into a virtual reality environment. After failing to track down the hacker known as "Frontier Setter", she is tasked to look for him down on Earth, now a barren planet where the rest of the humans live.

(Source: Wikipedia)

CAST

Angela Balzac
Rie Kugimiya
Frontier Setter
Hiroshi Kamiya
Zarik Kajiwara
Shinichirou Miki
Hilde Thorwald
Kotono Mitsuishi
Christine Gillum
Megumi Hayashibara
Veronica Kulikova
Minami Takayama
Alonzo Percy
Tooru Furuya

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REVIEWS

planetJane
50/100
An all-CGI anime both too boring to be any good and not notably horrendous enough to be truly bad. Utterly forgettable.
The following review assumes familiarity with the reviewed material, spoilers below.

One of the challenges of criticism is that it's not always easy to explain why something works or doesn't. Sometimes this can actually almost be a positive, marking something as a "so good you have to see it for yourself" sort of experience, but sadly the opposite is the case with Expelled From Paradise, a bafflingly dull CGI film produced by Toei Animation, directed Seiji Mizushima, animated by Graphinica, and with a screenplay by Gen Urobuchi. It is a failure from all parties, expected in some cases, surprising in others.

The simple fact of the matter is that above all else, Expelled From Paradise is awkward. Deeply, deeply awkward. In a way that'll be all too familiar for anyone who has watched anime for any length of time. A solid half of EFP is exposition, and at that, exposition about things that you, the audience, cannot reasonably be expected to care about. EFP's exposition is not unlike a lecture from the driest history professor imaginable, except instead of learning about actual, real history, and its tangible impacts, you are learning about "the Nanocaust" (seriously), and the construction of various colony ships. It's material that, better handled, could be genuinely interesting, but the presentation here is beyond flat, and it's difficult to muster up any particular emotion about the backstory, about 5 minutes after we learn of "The Nanocaust" we're introduced to something that dates to before it, which is clearly intended to be a revelation, but because of the clipped structure it simply doesn't feel that way.

The film is also preoccupied with a strange anti-technology agenda. A sharp contrast is made between our two leads, DEVA-employed cybercop Angela, and her Earth-bound, "rugged" (I use the term loosely), and of course male counterpart Dingo. The two barely have personalities, and really are more stand-ins for the philosophies they represent on the whole. Dingo's is fairly clearly defined. He's a natural, free-living sort, who likes rock and roll and drives a jeep (for the second time in this review I must emphasize, yes seriously). Angela's is much murkier, and while her near-blind loyalty to DEVA and its administrators is persistent throughout the first half of the film (where most of this moralizing takes place), the actual content of her philosophy shifts several times from conversation to conversation to the point that it's kind of hard to say what, really, she's meant to stand for. There are a handful of times that EFP comes close to making something like an actual point, a conversation in the film's middle in particular seems like it might be headed toward a veiled condemnation of capitalism--which, hey, is something--but then veers, and Dingo makes the absolutely baffling declaration that life on Earth, which he defines as being driven by pure luck, is better than life on DEVA, a sort of harsh meritocracy. At the end of the day neither character comes across particularly well in this department, which is frustrating because again, both seem like they could be interesting in other circumstances, handled better and propped up by better writing. Here, they are caricatures, and worse, it's not even clear caricatures of what.

It must be mentioned that the dialog being rigor mortis-stiff contributes a lot here. No one--past, present, or future--says aloud things like "we should consider not only the defense ramifications, but public opinion" in emotion-driven, spoken speech. Whether this can be attributed to translation or the writing itself is ambiguous, but to say that it comes across as wooden is an insult to the many fine uses--both practical and decorative--of wood itself.

The AI introduced in the film's second half (revealed to be Frontier Setter from the introduction) is actually the film's most charming character by far, if simply because he isn't meant to grandstand for some kind of moral agenda, and has no stance--at least not one we're given--on the Earth-lander/DEVA conflict (plus: at one point he remixes a song, which has to count for something). But by the time he's developed, the film is already nearing its end, having already been crushingly boring for a solid half of its runtime.

So is the film without redeeming qualities? No, for one thing, most of these complaints are about the film's first two-thirds. By its final stretch it effectively becomes a different movie entirely, as the focus shifts from Dingo and Angela on their mission to Angela and Frontier evading the forces of the DEVA ship. The plot takes a firm backseat to the action here, and the battles between Angela and the DEVA mechas are cool enough that you wish there were more of them in the film. Sadly, EFP can't avoid itself, and the film ends in disappointing and predictable fashion (Angela chooses to remain on Earth with Dingo instead of leaving to the stars with Frontier) and in the end the entire experience feels like it was for nothing in particular.

On top of that there are so many minor quibbles. Angela's body being explicitly pointed out as physically 16 for no good reason, the fact that Frontier has a guitar strapped to his back for much of the second half of the film despite not having hands, one of the film's last shots being a shot of a baseball cap falling to the ground, Dingo singing a shitty guy-with-an-acoustic version of the ending credits theme (itself pleasant enough) before the real one kicks in, the absolutely baffling decision to set so little of the film in cyberspace despite it starting there and cyber-psychadelia being an obvious choice for depicting in a full-CGI film. Lastly there are the intangibles, EFP simply doesn't feel correct. Shots linger for just too long or cut just too quickly, the dialogue isn't laughably terrible but not a single memorable line is spoken, the animation is competent but never rises above "JRPG Cutscene" excepting the final confrontation, and really, nothing interesting happens! At the end of the day Expelled From Paradise is a profoundly average piece of media. It is technically competent on a basic level, and has no glaring shortcomings in terms of literal execution, it tells a story that progresses from start to end more or less coherently, but these are all very low bars to clear. Expelled From Paradise commits the double sin of both not aspiring to be anything particularly interesting, and failing to even fully fulfill its already conservative ambitions. If it is recommendable on any level, it's as a baseline, in many ways, EFP is too bland and too competent to be truly terrible, and in that sense it is genuinely almost exactly average. If you could create a computer capable of generating anime films from scratch, Expelled From Paradise is the sort of thing it might come up with. Technically proficient, but on every artistic level, it simply isn't anything interesting.
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flavortown
70/100
A surprisingly relevant CGI movie from 2014 against the commodification of the Internet.
This review contains spoilers!

This wasn’t exactly the first movie on my radar. I was putting off playing Xenoblade Chronicles 2 the other day and noticed Masatsugu Saito did the art for that game along with this movie. And with Gen Urobochi on the script and the staff getting together again for another upcoming movie, my impulse viewing was locked in. What I expected was gratuitous CGI mecha action, and what I got was a tell-not-show movie that floats above average by having a few interesting things to say (and gratuitous CGI mecha action).

We're introduced right off the bat to the proto-Mythra, Angela Balzac, an officer in the digitized human civilization of DEVA who's tasked with tracking down a hacker on the outside known as Frontier Setter. With a newly cloned body, she's joined by her informant on the ground, Zarik Kajiwara aka. Dingo, for a not-quite-buddy cop journey through the still-inhabited ruins of a now barren Earth.

The voice work for the main cast is great, which is just as well when the movie lives by its dialogue. This goes for the Japanese version, which I watched first, as well as the English dub where Steve Blum stands out as the flippant cowboy-like Dingo.

The fully CGI visuals aren't perfect, with the models getting frame-y at times while the special effects are more consistently smooth, but it's good enough when it counts. Angela's emotions, and a few other things thanks to the excessive fanservice, are on full display.

As their investigation progresses, the tone shifts from a mystery to a character study. We learn much more about Dingo and the present state of Earth than Angela, who sticks to her belief that DEVA's way of life is superior to flesh-and-blood humanity – at least outwardly. When we're introduced to Frontier Setter, their twist reveal as an AI exposes us to their loneliness, their motivations, and a love for rock music so powerful it made them self-aware.

Peak character design

These revelations and more are somewhat held back by the tell-not-show approach the movie takes. The first half of the movie feels incredibly long as the mystery is interrupted with Angela working herself to exhaustion and getting a fever. Meanwhile, DEVA is left behind fairly early in the movie, so most of our knowledge of it comes from dialogue between Dingo and Angela. We do find out that DEVA prides itself for individual freedom while people's actions are limited by their government-assigned processing power, but Angela isn't there nearly long enough for more than a few of the cracks to show on their own.

The climactic mecha scene runs in the opposite direction, with a lot of action and not much talk. The attacking DEVA agents aren't interested in anything besides getting their job done and leaving Earth, and so Angela never speaks to them or vice versa even as they face off against one of their own. It's fitting enough, but it could have been a moment for us to see how the rest of DEVA would react to Angela's experiences.

In spite of the presentation, the movie has a fair bit to say. It's not particularly standout as a metaphor for authoritarianism and meritocracy in general, but apply it directly to the digital world today and it's awfully close to the mark. Corporations are getting bigger and bolder with their totally original "metaverse" plans, and their spaces marketed as paradise are the same ones where your presence can be erased on a whim by pattern-matching AI. If the EFP team's next project is a direct sequel, I'd love to see them double down.

Expelled from Paradise is not the worst movie you could watch on a weeknight. The English and Japanese voice work is solid, the bookending mecha scenes are a blast, and it's shockingly easy to resonate with for a movie from 2014 – as long as you can get through the slow patches.

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