In my dystopian universe I struggle to write blog posts, even though I actually get excited about writing it. In my dystopian universe there are three less hours in the day than everyone else has. In my dystopian universe people wait until the last minute to complete anything, making everyone else's jobs harder.
Start the review:
TITLE: Psycho-Pass
SUMMARY:
Psycho-Pass follows Akane Tsunemori in a cyber-punk 2113 Japan, as joins to police force and seeks justice. The Sibyl System, a super computer system that measures the citizens' mental states, helps to prevent crimes from happening, by judging the guilty in advance, but one man breaks every notion of this supposed justice and challenges detective Tsunemori's own judgement.
PERSONAL CRITIQUE:
Hope you guys don't mind the personal summary, I couldn't find a good short one to just copy and paste. We've reviewed that one of my favorite media forms is anime (that and video games), so of course anime are going to crop up in my lists. Particularly this list though! There are plenty of good dystopian future animes to choose from, but Psycho-Pass definitely stands out to me, because it reminds me a lot of Death Note actually. Follow along, if you will:
We kind of discussed the Sibyl System in the summary, basically it judges criminals before they act on their desires, obviously a broken system. At first glance, that sounds great, sure, no more rape, murder, arson or jay-walking. The thing is, we're judging them before they commit the crime, not only that, it's not fool-proof, very often criminals are not tagged before-hand. There are just a lot of issues with it, and, so that I don't have to throw up a spoiler warning, in the very first episode we see a potential flaw. The guns used by the police (called Dominators) have a lock on them, they will fire based on the criminal's level of danger, a green hue means the person you're aiming at is perfectly normal, they're no threat, so the gun will lock; a yellow hue means they are divergent from the normal state, liable to or are currently committing a crime, the gun will paralyze; a red hue means they are dangerous to society and must be eliminated, the Dominator converts to lethal elimination mode. Mind you, these people aren't necessarily murderers. In fact, based on the way the anime lays it out, people may not have the will to do evil things, but if they find evil things intriguing, or fantasize about them, they're capable of doing them, and therefore they can be put to death.
As an example scenario that the entire internet can relate to, if you're Adolf Hitler, but you never actually act on your desire to create a perfect race, you just sort of fantasize about it, the gun will switch to lethal eliminator mode, and kill you. Done.
As a side note, the hue colors I mentioned aren't exactly correct, like the main character is supposed to have a light-blue hue I think (the best around?). Anyway, did I get off on a tangent? Anyway, suffice it to say I can easily justify this being a dystopia in that everyone fears that they'll be judged negatively and get kicked out of the system, permanently. In fact, it's possible to worry to much and get labeled a divergent! Like what the heck?!
Anyway, aside from that, the anime does a good job of giving us a detailed setting, with a lot of backstory to the surprise ending, and a collection of awesome characters. More specifically the main character's sidekick, Shinya Kogami, who actually acts as sort of the main character. There's also a particular scene that tore me up from the inside out, and reminded me that sometimes I get way too attached to characters in tv series. So yeah. The final arc of the anime serves to wrap everything up nicely, while also ensuring everything is kept fresh, and the show itself isn't long enough to get stale. Loved it.
RATING:
Nine out of Ten system breaking psychopaths would give this one Five Lethal Eliminations, out of Five.
Seriously, this isn't my favorite anime ever, but it's definitely concise enough while being super detailed to earn a five star rating. I'm pretty generous, sure, but IMDB gives it an 8.3, MyAnimeList.com gives it 8.5, and so does TV.com, so it obviously did something right. A lot, it did a lot right.
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