I like a good Anime movie as much as anyone, and from all appearances, Netflix‘s original movie ‘Blame!’ should have been one of them. ‘Blame’ is based on the Anime comic with the same title, created by Tsutomu Nihei. The premise is encouraging, where some far distant future where humans live in an impossible megacity that has turned against them and called them “illegal residents.” This has forced the humans to live in essentially the sewers of the place, turning more and more tribal over the generations as they survive on eating synthetic blocks of yellow stuff. The humans are hunted by the city’s killer robots, known (uncreatively) as “exterminators,” spider-like machines with kabuki masks that are impossibly strong and fast. The village is desperate because they’re running out of food so they have to range further and further away from their safe zone, running afoul of the city’s defenses and dying quickly.
I wanted to love this movie, I really did — but I don’t. The art was great, but everything else failed to keep my interest. The fight scenes were little more than people screaming as they fired their somewhat-effective guns at the exterminators. They would kill a few, but inevitably a few more people from their group would be injured or killed. It just seemed entirely unlikely that people who lived their entire lives hiding from and hunting these killer robots would lose their cool and scream like children every time they saw one. And yet, no matter how fast the exterminators would scuttle toward the humans, somehow the humans managed to outrun them, every time.
Their goal was to “shut down the city” using an organic terminal of some kind. So this impossibly vast city of overpowered human-hunters and extensive computer networks is going to be taken down by a group of tribal humans who literally can’t open any of the doors in the city because they can’t conceive of using computer codes?
I found the movie incredibly boring and turned it off after an hour because I simply couldn’t care less what happened to the childish, bickering humans and their boring robot friends. I’m not sure who to ‘Blame!’ for this travesty of a film (sorry, I couldn’t help it), but my recommendation is no, you shouldn’t bother to check this one out unless you’re a die-hard fan of Manga and will watch it no matter how bad or boring it may be.
