Anime Club: Expelled From Paradise

Hello everybody! Glad to back to the weekly grind after a short absence. It’s time for us to bounce right back with an interesting sci-fi feature, Expelled From Paradise.

EXPELLED FROM PARADISE

DIRECTED BY: Seiji Mizushima

STARRING: Rie Kugimiya, Shin-ichiro Miki, Hiroshi Kamiya, Megumi Hayashibara, Kotono Mitsuishi, Tōru Furuya, Kenta Miyake, Daichi Otomo, Hisao Egawa, Noriko Uemura

GENRE: Science Fiction

YEAR: 2014

COUNTRY: Japan

With Earth now left in ruins following the “Nano Hazard,” most of humanity has abandoned the planet they once called home along with their physical bodies and rebuilt their digitalized minds into a society within the cyber universe of “DEVA.” A.D. 2400, DEVA’s central council detects an incident of unauthorized access into their mainframe. Someone on Earth was trying to hack into the system. The only information DEVA was able to retrieve was that the hacker referred to themselves as “Frontier Setter.” To investigate the mysterious hacker’s motives, the high officials of DEVA dispatch System Security Third Officer Angela Balzac to the Earth’s surface. Equipped with a prosthetic “material body,” Angela attempts to make contact with a local agent Dingo, but what awaited her instead was a swarm of Sandworms now infesting the Earth’s surface. Angela intercepts the gruesome pests with her exoskeletal powered suit Arhan. Will Angela and Dingo be able to find Frontier Setter on this devastated planet? Their journey to explore the secrets of the world will begin now…!

Expelled’s concept probably won’t win any originality awards, yet it executes its established conventions extremely well. If you look past the sci-fi premises, there’s a wealth of genres you can see influences of. When you break it down, the story is so extremely simple and straightforward that I didn’t even realize the movie was a whole 90-minutes long. Where plenty of sci-fis let its world do a lot of the talking, it’s really the characters of Expelled that connect to you. At times the dialogue deviates off into what often transpires in a buddy cop films.

The movie falls a bit short of being serious though. There aren’t huge points of moral conflict at the limit of where a principle runs out of gas and crashes into nuance. Instead we fly between different perspectives, moving from deeply flawed premises to obviously “good” ones. It makes this movie feel a bit candy-coated, especially when you add in the robot battles and gratuitous objectification of the female body.

PROS:

• Established conventions.
• Influence by a variety of genres.
• Well-written dialogue.

CONS:

• Rarely serious plot.
• Objectification.
• Lack of moral conflict.

SCORE: 7.0 / 10

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