*This Appleseed movie review is the last of four that I will be doing for the month. For a small primer on the comic series, check out my Appleseed Month announcement here*

Appleseed Alpha is an experiment of sorts.

It trades in the futuristic cityscape of Olympus for the war-torn streets of New York. Its main characters, as a result, are less optimistic and more antiheroic than their counterparts in previous Appleseed movies. It also looks vastly different with its photorealistic art direction.

Could this new formula result in a product that is as enjoyable as Appleseed Ex Machina? Or will it make Appleseed fans yearn for even the inferior 1988 and 2004 movies?

Appleseed Alpha begins with our iconic action girl and cyborg duo resting on a moving train in an abandoned subway system. There is no light in any of the stations, and the dust has gathered on both our heroes and the transportation. The wear and tear are most visible in Briareos. He is running low on power, so he has to disable many of his cybernetic functions to remain alive throughout the mission. This energy-saving measure prevents him from detecting a trio of hostile cyborgs who hijack the train for themselves. Thankfully, despite a weakened Bri, our heroes manage to dispatch those robots without much of a fight, but they lose a box of vaccines in the process.

Two Horns, the cyborg crime lord running the remnants of New York City who employs Deunan and Briareos, naturally did not appreciate the fact that his two underlings lost the vaccines meant for him, so he tasked them with a more dangerous task: to defeat a small group of rogue drones east of the city perimeter. While on that mission, they run into and rescue the cyborg Olson and the human Iris. Grateful for their aid, Olson helps to restore the weakened Briareos to full power and invites our heroes to help him and Iris on their mission to disable a powerful superweapon before it falls into the wrong hands. That encounter begins Deunan's and Briareos' descent into a larger conspiracy involving a warmongering evil corporation and (what else) a mega mobile fortress befitting the Appleseed franchise. Gunfights and heroic sacrifices ensue.

The look of the movie reminds me of other photorealistic CGI works like Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, with incredible detail to match. Human characters do have the chance to enter the uncanny valley, but that effect is minimal because they are a minority within a cast mostly composed of cyborgs and robots. The designs on those cyborgs are generic, divided between the hyper-futuristic and the grit-weathered, but they are expressive. I especially liked the mouth movements from the cyborgs who do have mouths to use. While their lip flaps do not perfectly match up to the dialogue, I love the subtle ways the steel and pistons orient themselves to fit the mouth shapes as if they were human skin and bones. Then you have the beautiful vista shots of a desecrated Big Apple. Times Square looks like a ghost town, its energy and vibe all but sucked out given the lack of people there. The surrounding desert is similarly lifeless, with only scant traces of human existence in the form of ruins and destroyed cars. So credit is due to Appleseed Alpha for matching its predecessors' stellar production values despite sporting a completely different art style from them.

Our main characters initially parallel the state of the world they are living in: withered and broken. With only a handful of exceptions, they do not trust anyone beyond their immediate circle of allies. Briareos is the more pessimistic of our two heroes, as he focuses on living from moment to moment. Iris may have had pursued a noble goal of disabling a superweapon, but she is as paranoid as Bri. In fact, when Deunan and her cyborg lover first rescued her, she thought that they were spies working for the movie's villains! Deunan is more outgoing than her partner, but she also chickens out when faced with death and the grander responsibilities placed on her to help Iris carry out her mission. In total, our protagonists eventually learn to be less cynical, to live out their lives in search of a purpose larger than survival. Those sorts of character arcs are standard for post-apocalyptic narratives, but at least they are a little better than those found in the some other Appleseed movies.

The villains (well, one of them at least) also have their share of moments. Talos, a cyborg operative (or leader?) of the evil Triton megacorporation, is the real villain who has predictable plans for world domination. But the real spotlight stealer has got to be Two Horns. He has a penchant for joking around with friends and foes alike, but the niceties and jokes always come because he knows his power and influence as the Big Apple's top crime lord. He is hammy and over-the-top in an enjoyable way; Wendel Calvert, his voice actor, must have enjoyed himself during recording as he nailed the character down. I wished he was a little more threatening, but I guess his attack on Talos with his small cyborg army is a decent show of force. I also liked Matthews, the geeky mechanic who takes care of Two Horns' cyborg army. He is a punch clock villain who only sticks around because he has nowhere else to go. That he and Two Horns are gray morality characters is pretty standard for post-apocalyptic stories (again), but they are still (arguably) the most compelling "villains" that the Appleseed movies series ever created.

(Here I should mention that Wendel Calvert recently passed away on February 20, 2018. I only realized that fact while working on this review. He was only 48 years old. Not even hitting 50. Just mighty unfortunate.)

In conclusion, Appleseed Alpha is a decent addition to the animated portfolio of the Appleseed series. It is much better than the 1988 OVA and the 2004 entry and is either as good as Appleseed Ex or just slightly worse. It succeeds by keeping its formula straightforward and its narrative streamlined, but without rendering its characters sterile and lifeless. The likes of Deunan and Briareos grow up some after this one adventure, and some of the villains are equally interesting. Add them to an incredible graphical package, and the result is a movie worth watching at least once.