Mardock Scramble: The First Compression
マルドゥック・スクランブル 圧縮Rune Balot is a down-and-out teen prostitute in Mardock City. One day, she's picked up by an ambitious casino manager named Shell who gives her everything she could want. Renewed by a false innocence, a false past, and now the false life Shell has given her, Balot feels grateful. However, she can't help but be curious about why he's done so much for her, so she does some research about his past on a computer. This turns out to be a mistake which will change her life greatly. When Shell finds out what she's done, he attempts to burn her to death by blowing up her car. Due to the high crime rate in Mardock, a new law called "Scramble 09" has given police carte blanche to take extreme and otherwise illegal measures to revive crime witnesses. With this in mind, they allow a professor to bring Balot back from the brink of death by reassembling her entire body with reinforced synthetic fiber. When she finally wakes up, her confused mental state eventually turns toward revenge as Shell is revealed as her killer. (Source: Nippon Cinema)
Reviews
zrogahn - 2013-07-02 06:08:45
Clarity is important to a movie's effectiveness. While it is true that clarity is always important in storytelling, a movie does well to keep that in mind even more, as there is much less time than usual to tell a story. With that in mind, as an introduction to a trilogy, Mardock Scramble: The First Compression does a wishy-washy job. The main issue with The First Compression's execution is its confusing way of expressing itself. The first section of the movie consists of a vague and confusing sequence of related events. Many intense and provocative things are shown during this, but their relevance and, at a more basic level, what exactly is happening in them is all left unexplained. It seems there was an attempt to let the visuals do the talking here, but it doesn't work very well because absolutely nothing about the setting or characters was explicitly stated and the viewer is left scratching their heads until the sequence ends and the main character, Balot, wakes up in a tank to begin the next segment of the movie. Once that is all over, though, things so relatively smoothly. The doctor, Dr. Easter, and Balot's companion for the rest of the movie, Oeufcoque, are quickly introduced. They are also utilized well in the sense that their conversations with Balot allow the viewer a more broad sense of the setting and the mechanics of Mardock Scramble's world. Unfortunately, while exposition was clearly part of the intent behind Dr. Easter and Oeufcoque's words, they fell victim to the movie's habit of keeping things too vague to be able to say everything portrayed in the movie made sense. This is a good thing in that their conversations were kept natural, but also a problem since there were no other chances given throughout the movie to expand upon the various political and technological developments that drive the movie's plot as a whole, making it all feel quite shallow. While Dr. Easter's character is used mostly for storytelling utility and plot advancement, Oeufcoque stands as an anomaly among the characters, as he is interesting and unique. His development very much mirrors Balot's, as they are together through most of the movie and a majority of the dialogue is focused on them. However, unlike Balot, who's characterization begins fairly interesting and soon falls to melodrama and inconsistency, Oeufcoque begins the movie as the logical sidekick character and slowly reveals moments of real emotion and expression. He keeps the other characters in check and brings the tone of the movie to a more believable standard whenever he is allowed to have an influence on it. If there is anything this movie did well, it was Oeufcoque and in a related way his relationship with Balot. Unfortunately, after some Balot-related plot developments are over, the movie decides to change atmosphere completely and enters a much worse territory than it was in before. Expanding upon its awkward focus on sexual desire, several incredibly undeveloped throwaway characters with a vague and uninteresting motivation are introduced seemingly for the sole purpose of giving Balot a reason to become a completely different character, presumably in an attempt to have her appear more complex. This was a mistake. The action scenes are boring and unimpressive, clearly given less thought than the rest of the movie was. The character designs are unintentionally hilarious and impossible to take seriously. This all results in a boring and unimportant final segment where Balot is shown fighting various enemies, leaving plenty of room for overdramatized scenes and a complete and intentional ignorance of the characterization that has happened thus far, culminating in a predictable cliffhanger for the second movie. It really is too bad that Mardock Scramble: The First Compression was unable to stay consistent or find its identity in this movie, as it is very pretty and does take place in an interesting world in its own right, but not there's simply not much to be said after finishing it except for "well, what was all that for, anyway?"
haag.deontae - 2013-05-22 09:19:55
This installment of Mardock Scramble is the first in what’s planned to be a 3-part series. In it, a teenage prostitute is killed by the man who took care of her, but she’s brought back to life by some magical science to try get revenge on her killers. She’s given a robotic body, lots of skin tight clothing and a highly intelligent golden mouse who can transform into whatever he wants, normally a gun of some sort.It’s hard to talk about Mardock Scramble without giving out some plot setting spoilers. People might say that descriptions of the plot aren’t spoilers at all, but it does seem a shame to hurt one of the few things this movie actually does very well. The exposition, often a clunky and tedious part of a movie, was revealed in a gradual course of exchanges between the female lead, Balot, and her mouse sidekick, Eufcoque. Asides from revealing how the world works and what the extents of Balot’s and Eufcoque’s powers are, it also builds up the relationship between the two in one of the most strangely charming duos I’ve ever seen. Balot doesn’t exactly think straight, hardly surprising given her past, and abuses her powers for various reasons. Eufcoque doesn’t think like a human, seeing as he’s a mouse and everything, but his mind works off a logic that hauls in Balot and builds a trust between the two. Using the other as a springboard for further exploration, the movie excels in the exchanges between the two that make up about half of the movie.I did say that this was one of the things that it actually did well, which implies that the movie performed less favourable in other areas. This movie has a lot of grand ideas about how great it is and how it’s exploring themes of depression and sexual desires, but most of it is done in such awful fashion that parts of the movie come out as unintentional humour. There’s a group of underground surgeons towards the end of the movie with a taste for attaching parts of human bodies to themselves. One guy has eyes all over his body, which was probably supposed to be intimidating but really just looked stupid. There was another guy with breasts sewn all over his body like that ghost from the Fat Stocking episode of Panty and Stocking. The rest all equally looked like characters Apocalypse Zero. As for the disturbingly literal nickname of their leader, Pussyhands, the less said the better.These characters were probably supposed to symbolise humans living out their sexual fantasies, but like much of the rest of the foreshadowing and imagery, it mainly resulted with scenes in various degrees of clunky or stupid. A bunch of the characters are given names related to eggs, such as Boiled and Shell, probably meant to symbolise birth of a new life or whatever, but that was rather eye-roll inducing, like calling the violent villain in your show Vicious or something. There were some more standard problems, such as lots of cryptic conversations that failed to grab the interest, or overbearing level of madness they gave characters that didn’t fit well into the story. Oh, and playing Amazing Grace as your ending song was pretty eye-rolling too.Not all of the symbolism failed, to be fair, the relationship between Balot and Eufcoque being the best example. Heck, anything good about this movie came about when it was just those two together. The best scene in the movie was one where Balot asked Eufcoque to love her, with the golden mouse’s stuttered retort being that he wasn’t capable of loving as a mouse and that “I can’t just turn into a male human in order to love you”. The scene, asides from revealing a slightly messed up side to Balot’s mind, also shook Eufcoque and revealed we wasn’t quite as assured and logically perfect as earlier scenes had you believe.(As an aside, I kept expecting Balot to turn Eufcoque into a dildo. That wasn’t just a dirty mind at play in a highly sexualised anime. Balot kept going on about how she just wanted someone to love her, with the only way she knew love in her depraved life was through sex, but Eufcoque kept pointing out that he was just a vessel that was incapable of love and that he was just a tool to pretend she was being loved. See where I’m going with this? Contrast this to our good friend Mr.Pussyhands, who quite literally has sex with his hand. I would not be that surprised if Eufcoque becomes masturbation aid at some point in the later movies)Again, this movie only ever good when it was just interactions between the main character and her mouse sidekick, the rest of the movie being dumb, sometimes painfully so. Thankfully a lot of the movie was just interactions between the main two, which is enough to keep my interest to watch the later installments. But it’s not enough for me to recommend it either.