Review of Psycho-Pass: The Movie

This is a generic American-styled action movie of the Michael Bay type, but with Urobuchi returning as the writer, so we get a few quotes from a book or two, and MAYBE a little bit of political subtext. Thanks for the enlightenment, man. The choice bits this time include name dropping a Proust book that a terrorist is reading—because there's no better encouragement to bust your gut with a bomb than to read turgid old French lit about irrelevancies—of which this entire film consists of; the other stuff Urobuchi was reading at the time was post-colonial literature—definitely not my thing, but it's pretty apt fora movie that is about colonialism, and not in the usual way of militancy or the slightly subtler debt-trap diplomacy—Sibyl is exporting its wonderful tech, starting with Southeast Asia.

To quickly summarize the story, Kougami is training guerrillas to fight an SE Asian dictator and smash his Sibyl smart city, and lovesick Akane follows after Kougami to be his groupie—I mean, to arrest him. The rest of the cast plays second fiddle and have only bit parts (Ginoza is treated better here than in S2 at least).

Sibyl replicating itself abroad actually would make for an interesting story. The problem is the structure of the film. An action film is not an adequate way to explore these ideas. There's no sense of world building like the original series had. It's just exoticism. A new locale to do the same thing, but instead of a low-crime, peaceful country like Japan, we're looking at a basket case country with a military dictatorship and the chaos of a civil war nearing its end.

I had mixed feelings about this premise because Sibyl makes zero sense in Japan. They have such a low crime rate. Career selection is about the only use Sibyl has, and that could easily be supplementary or done away with. It's so easy to dislike Sibyl and be against it in the Japanese context.

Shamballa Float is a bit of a different story. It is a miniature country (I guess created for this purpose) to not only test the Sibyl system abroad, but to get the foot in the door in SE Asia. It seems like a relatively nice place, but outside, there are dead bodies hanging from beams and armed guerrilla fighters everywhere... yeah, so, if you wanted something like Sibyl to promote law and order, this would be the place to utilize it. Of course, once a government implements a policy, they will always keep it if they are able and it is beneficial to do so. Good old-fashioned militancy is probably the way to tackle the problem—Sibyl will ultimately end up being a burden.

At the very least, all of this talk about "democracy" doesn't make much sense in these conditions. The country obviously needs a military junta to bring order to what is a shambolic (pun intended) state. Akane was getting visibly upset when Colonel Wong was hunting down rebels who were spraying rifles and who had ISIS-styled Toyota trucks with machine gun mounts roaming around the cities! Like, are we really supposed to care? Before the modern age, most countries that are now peaceful KILLED OFF most of their criminals. It certainly happened in Europe. Arguably, you could call these "freedom fighters," but there's not really enough depth to this story to indicate they're any better other than they have a no-Sibyl platform—I couldn't care less that Kougami is training them.

A bit of a spoiler, but it's VERY predictable, anyway, and I think it's very important to note that Sibyl planned EVERYTHING out that happens. There are no real surprises and the whole situation was managed. Akane was probably just sent because Sibyl hates her, she sucks, and should die (I think Urobuchi does a lot of good and necessary things with Akane in S1, but she is generally kind of irritating). All of this was just a ruse to build up Sibyl in SE Asia, then massacre most of the military because of their (actually) high criminal coefficient scores. This is a lame revelation because the whole plot is just a bunch of cogs and wheels in a clock. Depending on the way you look at it, Sibyl probably caused a lot more unneeded deaths as well. Sibyl justifies it with an appeal to "human rights," not unlike NATO with Kosovo or whatever other hyped-up charge in other scenarios. There's a nice parallel.

What I've been pondering is whether or not the writer takes the promotion of democracy here seriously—or if it's meant to be cynical. The reason I say that is Akane manages—AGAIN—to twist Sybil's brain stems into holding elections instead of maintaining their puppet dictator by the end. Their guy wins, so then you have to question whether Sybil rigged the elections or the dictator won because he's popular. Western media has a tendency to call leaders dictators (even when they're not) and claim elections are rigged when there isn't any evidence. The way I interpreted the ending was that Sybil pretends to throw idiot Akane a bone, puts forward a good faith gesture to appear "democratic" and give the illusion of choice to the people, and all the while, Sybil makes sure to control everything and win. Democracy is not about choice—it's about using the media to manipulate a dumbed-down public.

The presumption that a dictatorship or military junta would necessarily have a higher criminal coefficient also seems dubious. Do soldiers in general have hue issues? It's a stressful profession that needs regular psychological maintenance, but most soldiers are law abiding citizens. I know these shows like to depict the "bad guy" military people blowing babies up in microwaves, but in most cases they are likely killing rival militants. A dictator and his bureaucracy would not necessarily have a higher criminal coefficient. Obviously, it was going to be the case that the dictator and his henchmen in this WOULD, but I just don't think Kougami's biases are correct.

Of course, I'm making it sound like the film is purely politics or the script is even half as interesting as S1, but it's mostly just one big action set piece. Certain fight scenes are kind of cool, but the animation is unremarkable other than these moments—even many of the fights have a surprisingly low amount of frames for a movie. The mercenaries are mildly entertaining, but they ultimately get dispatched too easily, and fall into James Bond villain mode and talk themselves into their own graves. They make a lot of wong choices with Wong as well—he is completely flat and has no motivation or reason for anything other than he's doing his job, I guess? The visuals are complimented often, but I think most of the surroundings look like a playstation 1 adventure game—loads of garbage CGI everywhere. The characters are all one-note, and they rely on past chemistry between Akane and Kougami to sell the whole thing, but it's just not there. Makishima even makes a pointless appearance as an illusion. There's very little substance, and there's much better style elsewhere. Just look at the cover and judge it by its cover. The movie is as bad as the cover. As much of a train wreck as S2 was, at least that did SOME interesting things.