Bekushiru: 2077 Nihon sakoku (2007)

Bekushiru: 2077 Nihon sakoku: Directed by Fumihiko Sori. With Meisa Kuroki, Shôsuke Tanihara, Yasuko Matsuyuki, Akio Ôtsuka. Japan, 2077: A female agent named Vexille is dispatched to Tokyo to investigate whether Japanese are developing robotic technology, which has been banned by the U.N. due to its potential threat to humankind.

“The plot: After Japan withdraws from the United Nations and expels all foreigners, the West becomes increasingly suspicious that Japan is conducting illegal research on robotics and transhumanism.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eVexille is a generic cyberpunk story about of the evils of transhumanism, megacorporations, isolationism, and imperialism. The art is beautiful, but it seems wasted on such a derivative and clichéd plot. The story had some real potential, but they decided to dumb everything down, remove all subtlety, and turn the antagonist into a James Bond villain. This is the kind of movie that has themes that a 15 year old would find incredibly deep and philosophical, mixing in generic cyberpunk themes with Romanticism and technophobia. Very little of the movie was actually engaging. Both the characters and the action sequences were flat and mostly interchangeable.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eMaybe this movie had a point, when it railed against the lack of soul in technological advancement: the CGI art was beautiful but entirely soulless.”