UK Release Date: 01-09-2008
Price: £19.99
UK Certificate: 12A
Director: Fumihiko Sori
Country: Japan
Distributor: Momentum

Japanese anime Vexille is set in 2077: Japan’s advances in robotics and biotechnology have led to United Nations censure, and the country’s consequent retreat into total isolation. A crack American special services unit is ordered to penetrate its formid­able defences and find out what’s going on – most are blown up on arrival, but one girl survives to team up with a female leader of an underground resistance movement, bring down the tyrannical Daiwa corporation and save the world.

Vexille is, then, an unsophistic­ated reworking of the sci-fi staple ‘beware runaway techno­logy in the hands of megaloman­iacs bent on world domination’; the storyline is basic, the characterisation bland, the exposit­ion clunky and the moralising heavy-handed. But the film looks spectacular, with sometimes distractingly fantastic rendered materials, textures and landscapes. Movement is awesomely realistic, apart from a few isolated moments of awkward motion from the characters – though these are perhaps no worse than wooden actors in an average live-action sci-fi action flick. And the best thing about the film is some hulking great robots, flying body armour suits, huge trucks and giant metal-hungry experiments-gone-wrong crashing around the wasteland like junkyard Dune sandworms. The action is pumped along by a high-energy, occasionally intrusive, Paul Oakenfold score, building to a disappointingly underwhelming climax.