Review: ALTERED CARBON: RESLEEVED a Beautifully Animated Film with a Shallow Story
After the mixed reviews for Season 2 of Altered Carbon, an anime film was quite the surprise, and most fans were very excited. With an emphasis on animation and action, the story suffered a lot, even more than in Season 2 of Altered Carbon. Takeshi is hired as a bodyguard and must work with an unlikely ally while fighting against crazy powerful ninja-enhanced sleeves.
This anime is basically looked at from two points: visuals and story. Visually, the movie is quite stunning. The slick animation, high contrasting colors, and beautiful action scenes make the movie very entertaining to watch. These fight scenes could make even the worst stories watchable. Some of the abilities and technologies seem to be a little outside of the universe of Altered Carbon, but it is an anime and never becomes too much for the show. But aside from the actual fights, the design and artwork as a whole was real easy on the eyes and a pleasure to watch.
However, loads of beautiful animation can’t make bad things great. As I said, it is a totally watchable movie, but the story is mostly shallow and just gives some better insight and understanding to things that happen later in Season 2. It is nice to see the connection, but the twists, turns, reveals, and plot complexities are pretty predictable and feel almost boring at times. As for the characters themselves, Takeshi's new sleeve, actor, and version seems the most unlike Takeshi. The character is stiff and brash, which isn’t too far off. But he is also less sarcastic and more serious throughout the whole movie, making him pretty boring and uninteresting to watch. A fan of the show would have a hard time knowing it was Takeshi if he wasn’t identified by the movie itself.
Overall this movie felt like a fun trip into a new style for Altered Carbon, and I hope to see various new animations or even spin-offs to go deeper into the other settled worlds. However, I do wish there was a lot more care and reason to explore the life and story of Takeshi, he is a pretty special character and deserves better story arcs and character growth than in this film. It is a fun watch, but don’t expect a deep or believable story.
