Review of Lazarus

Absolutely boring series where nothing happens, nothing matters and every episode wastes 23 minutes of your limited time on Earth. Hapna, the magical painkiller, is going to kill the ultimate pain: Humanity. Anyone who took the drug is going to die in one month. The show tells you this multiple times, with a countdown timer after every episode and the characters constantly restating the premise. You would never be able to tell this is the case. Everyone in the show carries on like it's business as usual. No riots, no looting, no desperate mass-suicides. The show never tells you how many people took the drug, orwhat percentage or portion of the world's population took it, but they imply it was the vast majority of them. 90% of the population, more or less. You're telling me that almost everyone on Earth is going to die in 30 days and they still feel like going to work? Going to their museum job open, airlines still flying? It doesn't feel like anything is at stake.

This lack of stakes or any real sense of urgency is carried over into the episodes themselves. Each episode is a slow, plodding, meandering waste of 20 minutes. Each episode starts with the characters discussing their next move to find Skinner. Then the episode trudges on with a lot of "vibey" scenic shots with subpar jazz music. Nothing happens, then at the end they find that the thing they were chasing was a red herring. Repeat for 6 episodes.

The characters are blank slates. Axel is an unstoppable god who can get out of any situation. He's never in anything resembling danger. You could throw him into an active volcano and he'd parkour his way out and not even break a sweat. His superhuman abilities make the action in the show feel even less consequential. There's a hacker girl who just hacks and does magic with computers finding things that don't matter, there's a boy whose entire character is that he is boy. There's a woman, who is trying to be Faye Valentine but failing miserably. She has no personality other than mildly snarky at times and she does the Watanabe face. There's black man, whose entire character is staring at nothing. He has the only bit of backstory so far, in which he beat up a professor. He's probably the only one with any real motivation, his whole reason for finding Skinner is probably because he's a professor he hasn't punched yet.

The visuals are mediocre. Everything is brown, gray and beige with that overly clean digital look a lot of modern anime have. There's no real soul or direction here, other than generic future and CGI. Tons of CGI. A ridiculous amount of it.

The animation is made to be admired by people who know nothing about animation or people 16 and under. The action is rotoscoped, with no real sense of weight or timing. It's like they traced over footage of poorly coreographed fights, paying no real attention to how the movements would look when drawn. There is very little in the way of anticipation, exaggeration or follow-through. It's very stiff and lifeless, with every punch and kick having most of their frames evenly spaced, making them look slow and floaty. Most of the actions lack good, clear posing. They just slap a few floaty 2D characters and put the camera on a tilt-a-whirl, spinning around them as they slide all over poorly composited 3D backgrounds like the jittery special effects in the Nostalgia Critic's intro.

I can say all I want about it, but the worst thing about this show is that it's boring. I was hate-watching it with a few friends, laughing at it, but the laughable moments are too few and far between. For each elevator fight scene, where the characters are morphing all over the screen and ending up in inhuman poses, we have hours worth of boring, static shots where characters openly state the most boring doomsday theories ever. The polar ice caps are melting! Oh no! Who cares? They don't even get into the fun theories. No one is getting mind-controlled by 5G or getting turned into grey goo by a swarm of microbots.

Maybe Skinner was right, we ought to call it a day.

Edit after finishing the show (no spoilers):
Save yourself the trouble of watching this garbage. You know how it ends, even if you haven't seen it. It's bad in a way that defies all common sense. There's an action scene that looks like it's from a completely different show, the cliched plot threads are resolved in the easiest, most cliched way possible and nothing matters. There is a completely horrible twist that was never set up, that would be mocked and derided in the trashiest light novel. Shinichirou Watanabe is a complete hack. Lazarus was so bad it retroactively damaged my opinion on Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo.

The show was dedicated to Keiko Nobumoto, who, after doing some research, was the one that served as Watanabe's handler and made his writing acceptable. Lazarus was done without her, and it shows.