Look, I get it. If you’re going to steal visual designs, Neon Genesis Evangelion is probably a good choice. It’s got some good designs. But if you’re going to steal from Eva, show a little respect and actually use the pilfered parts in a way and in a place that has the weight and awesomeness the material deserves. Having a cruddy little robot that would be stomping material even by most Real Robot standards mimic EVA-01 just makes you look even lamer for the comparison.
Audio Commentary and thoughts after the
cut.
So, this whole episode is spent in
battle against the robot maid from last time and… by Haruhi’s bored
indifference, is it lame. I don’t know how much is foolish choice,
how much is incompetent skill, and how much is budget constraint, but
Ex-Arm looks worse than any other show I’ve watched. It’s not even
close. And I hate to keep bringing up the animation but that really
does underscore the biggest issue with this episode, the fact that it
is all action. And it looks like that.
An action scene, and by extension an
action show, lives and dies on what you can see, the visual spectacle
is supported by the emotional and intellectual investment rather than
supporting the emotional and intellectual sides. The choreography
and cinematography are, honestly, the main dish. This is why it
sucks in Action films when everything takes place in the dark with
flashing lights and a jittery camera and you can’t see any of the
intensity that’s theoretically going on. Ex-Arm at least doesn’t
have that problem, but because it’s an ugly mess of mixed art styles
and terrible choreography, it faces a similar failure.
And, I’ll spare a few words for that
choreography. In good action, you have to maintain some degree of
continuity, because you need to follow a story being told in motion
rather than in words. Ex-Arm doesn’t do that. Each shot of action
is basically isolated from all the others, so there’s no narrative in
the action. Any given motion could be at the start of the fight, the
end of the fight, or somewhere in the middle and each one could,
broadly, lead into or flow out of any of the others. There’s a point
in the audio commentary where I liken the action in Ex-Arm here to
the scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where it repeatedly cuts
to the same shot of Lancelot running towards the camera, each time
starting him back in the exact same position he started the previous
shot in before, suddenly, he’s right on top of the castle guards.
That is a comedy. It is being played
for surreal laughs. Ex-Arm is (or at least wants to be) a serious
Action show and it does basically the same blasted thing. The number
of times our lead, piloting the Ogre mech, has to run through
basically the same devastated block, which should only have been a
second or two of a rush, is absurd. There’s no indication that his
foe is backing off or throwing him away between shots, so it’s not
like a car chase either, the director just didn’t care and kept
saying “Ok, for this shot have him charge forward down the street
at her.”
It’s bad, in some ways even worse than
the slow and stiff fight between the cop and maid robots on foot last
episode, because while the individual animation rigs move a little
better (at least some of the time) it’s found all new ways in which
to fail.
For the story, you could guess it’s not
much. MC already took over the Ogre last episode (though it needs to
be introduced now), and we don’t get much aside from the
techno-babble of winning the fight until the very end. After getting
a decisive hit on the maid’s mecha, we see that her master is a
brain-dead husk, only technically alive, whose last (and not current)
orders she’s following out of loyalty that almost seems loving. She
goes into desparation mode, and main character busts out the
berserker state that steals EVA-01’s face in order to finally bring
her down. He does this, causing global chaos by hacking satellites
rather than just hacking her, and drags her bodily out of the mecha
after causing her telefrag weapon to finish off her master. Police
lady and our robot girl stop him from finishing her off and drag him
back to what would presumably be recovery for his shattered mind,
leaving the maid robot to crawl over to her deceased boss and take
his hand, smiling. I’m not sure if she’s dead from battle injuries,
shutting off for lack of her master, or still fine – she ends with
a lifeless, still smile but the animation is so lifeless and still
throughout that I can’t tell if she’s supposed to be exceptionally
still.
Presumably next episode will bring us a
new incident. I’d say I’d hope it would be better than this one, but
this is Ex-Arm. Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here.