Oh, classic Cyberpunk, how I’ve missed you. I might be more partial to more optimistic sci-fi, in part because it’s so rare, but there’s just something absolutely exquisite about the occasional piece of media willing to display some adroitly grim and rebellious retro-future stylings – dark shadows, menacing greebles, body horror, bizarre fashion, fanservice, and of course a good slathering of ye olde ultra-violence.
Armitage III is determined to deliver.
OVA Series
We start the first episode of the OVA with a space plane landing at Mars. One of the passengers is a famous country singer, another is a transferring cop named Ross Sylibus, and the event is disrupted by the most forcefully “cool” rebel this side of The Matrix, whose spiked blonde hair, dark shades, and black leather let you know right away both that he’s the baddie and what kind of setting you’re in.
Disruption at baggage claim reveals that the the punk has killed the country singer, though killed may be a hard word given the revelation immediately after.
And who is making this disruption? Not the punk and his goons, who were sauntering out of the place, and not Sylibus either. Rather, it’s made by Sylibus’s new partner and the titular character, Naomi Armitage. She shoots first and asks questions never, does all sorts of combat acrobatics, throws hand-cuffs at bad guys as some kind of calling card, and all in all rocks what is most certainly not a standard-issue Martian police uniform.
In other shots her hot pants come up significantly higher on her waist, but the artists wanted you to be happy.
Thus we begin our buddy cop adventure the way every buddy cop adventure begins: One’s a stick-in-the-mud, the other is a wild and crazy rule-breaker, and together they’ve got a mystery to solve!
And it seems that both our leads may have personal stakes in the case, as Armitage fails to play cool the reveal that the country singer was a robot (one more advanced than the modern “Second” series, an unregistered and illegal “Third”), and Sylibus’s tragic past (like hell the serious cop in one of these was going to fail to have a tragic past) may involve robots and robot affairs as well.
The Thirds are actually kind of interesting, in that when we see the country singer’s autopsy, it seems like they’re sort of reverse cyborgs: custom-built skeletons and artificial brains, but cultured biological components meaning at least some of their organs and the skin that hides them are human. I’m sure that won’t come up later.
We begin to explore the far future of… let me check my notes here… 2046, where civilized Mars is some kind of enclosed megacity with extreme verticality, high-rises hanging down from the ceiling, and roads perilously suspended over the void by no discernible means of support.
And in this city, it’s clear that humanoid robots are presently a hot-button social issue, with protesting mobs demanding that robots be expunged from society. Armitage seems to have a pretty big chip on her shoulder about this, and her partner’s trauma-induced dislike for artificial types. Given the title of the show and the focus on “Thirds” that act as (near) perfect human impostors, you get no points for guessing why.
The punk, who reveals his name as D’anclaude, begins a spree of Third-killing like somebody died and made him Blade Runner, and he’s also a proficient TV-hijacker prone to displaying his crimes to the world in order to inflame the already angry populace.
Pursuing a potential lead, Sylibus ends up in a struggle with D’anclaude in a ruined church, during which D’anclaude gets to chew the scenery for a bit before Armitage shows up, pulls some superhuman moves, and proudly declares herself to be a Third who won’t forgive him for “cleaning up some illegal robots”.
Between machine manipulation to smash the roof of the church with a crane, speed, strength, taser hands, and the ability to survive a knife to the throat, Armitage takes the ensuing struggle.
However, she promptly has a mental breakdown over her status and what it means to be a robot, and saving her from that takes precedence. Even after being fished out of the river she jumped into, Armitage is still pretty inconsolable, and runs from Sylibus (who himself seems to be softening on the robot proposition having already experienced her human character).
Even with D’anclaude’s arrest, murders of Thirds continue, starting in episode 2 with one Lavinia Whately… oh boy it’s tangent time.
So, a fair number of proper nouns in Armitage III are borrowed from the works of HP Lovecraft, the influence of which in Anime I took a bit of a look at last spooky season. Even “Armitage” can refer to Professor Armitage, a central character in The Dunwich Horror. In fact, Dunwich in specific is where most of the references seem to pull from and… I’m not sure why. I’m sure if I flexed my English Major muscle I could fabricate an essay about how deep the connections are, likely focusing on horror surrounding birth, but let’s be honest, it would mostly be a plausible line of bull misusing and abusing the evidence. Here and now, not writing to impress a professor but to inform an audience, I’m going to suggest that maybe somebody on staff was just a fan and thought the names sounded cool and foreign.
Oh, and as for Armitage herself, she’s AWOL and a bit on the lam, which in 90’s-visual-speak means we see her brooding on girders suspended in the weird voids of the Martian megacity, since that’s as rooftop-like a place as we can get in this setting.
She’s busy beating up thugs, but also gets implicated in another Third murder. As this is being investigated, the brass also makes a discovery, of why all the Thirds seen so far are female and what sets them apart: Thirds, it appears, are capable of reproducing with humans.
This leads Sylibus and Armitage to reunite – with shockingly little negative emotion given their parting and her arrest warrant – where they can find Pluto, aka Julian Moore, the last of the Thirds and seemingly the only male among the series, who appears to know all about the case.
They go down to the sewers for no reason announced, only to be attacked by a Dr. Robotnik machine that turns out to be driven by a robot duplicate of D’anclaude. Oh, and while this is the second time we get a good shot, if you thought Armitage’s first outfit was silly, please enjoy that under the cool black cloak of her second outfit, she’s traded up to racy lingerie.
Since Sylibus came out of the interchange pretty badly injured, Armitage kisses him goodbye and leaves him for medics to come and pick up. Thus ends the second episode.
For the third, Armitage (back to her original costume) and Julian investigate their origins while Sylibus works the case, going rogue cop to track down a scummy corporate executive. Piecing both sides together they learn that D’anclaude was a roboticist, while his mechanical copies are some kind of super-robot, able to turn at least some robots into living bombs as happens to Julian (who was hacked back by Mecha-D’anclaude while hacking a database.) and a random bot near Sylibus’s enhanced interrogation.
It also seems that higher powers are getting involved, but as to why, we’ll have to get the whole sordid story. Armitage and Sylibus link up with the goal to do just that and/or restore Julian from backups that he made before his untimely detonation.
The first step involves saying hi to Julian by diving into the incredibly Tron-inspired program space
Down on the Grid (where everybody but Sylibus is naked for some reason, albeit with barbie doll anatomy), Julian’s backup mind explains that he figured out that D’anclaude (original) and a scientist called Asakura (who Armitage has considered to be her father) were the co-creators of the Thirds.
This sends them to find the real D’anclaude, who is at a hospital. Spooky forces have garrisoned the hospital like it’s a military base, so Armitage and Sylibus, being the rogue 90’s cops they are, shoot and explode their way in until they find D’anclaude. He’s not exactly happy to see them, but he does let slip that for real answers, they need to confront Asakura at Dunwich Hill (Or Danich hill depending on the localization, but given all the other references, it’s Dunwich)
They also encounter Mecha D’anclaude again, now welded into a giant death robot
This series surfs on the line between awesome and absurd. The episode three cliffhanger is Armitage seeming to explode and mutual kill Mecha D’anclaude. But of course there’s a fourth and final episode of OVA to consider.
Naturally, Armitage survived, though her having taken some internal damage that’s hard to fix is an emotional beat throughout the fourth and final episode as she tries to understand why she exists while staring down death by damaged CPU. Now fugitives in earnest, the two go to Dunwich Hill and find Asakura.
Unfortunately for them, Asakura isn’t all there upstairs, and what few answers they get, they get from a much different Mecha-D’anclaude called Wilbur who is taking care of the old man and his freaky giant treeborgs.
Denied and lost, Armitage and Sylibus have their H-scene (it’s not explicit), but you know something has to give to provide a bigger and better conclusion than this.
The morning after, Wilber D’anclaude shows the two something of value to their predicament – an unfinished copy of Armitage. He also helpfully puts together the pieces and tells the full history of the Thirds: the first generation (like the Mecha-D’anclaudes) were intended to be assassins. Asakura built on Dr. D’anclaude’s work and developed his reproductive-capable fembot Thirds in order to address a social issue: Due to Earth in this setting being a “feminist society” (here with the implication more of “matriarchal” and female-dominated) most immigrants to Mars have been men, resulting in low birth rates and a the colony finding it difficult to sustain itself, thus making it tempting to sneakily add a few more wombs onto the equation.
This is made to be a larger issue for Martian independence, since the colony can’t jolly well expect to be self-sufficient if it still needs an immigrant stream. Thus, we get to the hunt for the Thirds: Earth caught wind and provided both carrot and stick, promising a burgeoning supply of colonists (including women) if the Thirds were wiped out, or war if not.
Thus, the show speeds towards a conclusion as Martian officials prepare to sign away their sovereignty and military forces close on Dunwich Hill to destroy everything and everyone there. Asakura manages to get lucid enough to fix up Armitage, and then sends her away with Sylibus while he and Wilbur die with his latest creations in the military’s strike.
The two decide to go for broke, facing off against the Terran warbots and giving a good account of themselves before their apparent deaths, a nd their struggle is broadcast through hijacking the Earth Chancellor’s celebratory parade, seemingly having an effect on people and robots alike, but none on any treaties to be signed.
Except, after a “several months later” bumper we see that the two are alive and well with new fake identities and, as Armitage reveals, a kid on the way. Thus ends the OVAs.
This story was repackaged into a 90-minute movie form subtitled Poly-matrix, but I don’t intend to address that. Not only is it the same material but cut down when what I watched had fairly little fat, it was actually an American-only production and has in fact never been dubbed in Japanese.
Instead, let’s talk about what Armitage III brings to the table. As I alluded to, it hits pretty much every 90’s action-cyberpunk note. Gratuitous violence, gratuitous fanservice, sets that you can’t tell if are absurd or cool, and more cerebral potential than you might otherwise expect.
In Armitage III, a lot is admittedly left for the viewer. It tacitly raises questions regarding the nature of humanity, but it never really addresses them straight on. Clearly, the sympathy is on seeing Armitage herself, and tacitly her fellow Thirds, as being essentially human, but it’s not clear whether it’s meant to be that the line is about their cognition, or about their ability to reproduce. Yet somehow this still presages the Blade Runner sequel, you figure that out.
A lot of the other elements of the show are also… shallower than they can be. We never really delve into Sylibus’s past trauma over robots and cyborgs, and what it means both that he needs more and more prosthesis as he gets injured (a fact that clearly means human purists in this setting would file him as “other”) and that he falls in love with the robotic Armitage. We also don’t really solve many mysteries or arrest many malefactors. Things happen, and our leads are dragged along into difficult circumstances. Many of those circumstances are engaging in their own right, but there’s not an idea of progress, or that they’re getting closer to accomplishing anything. And that’s probably because they don’t accomplish much in the real scheme of things.
The opposite number is Armitage’s mental struggle. As she’s beating down D’anclaude (the first time) and revealing that she is, herself, a Third, Armitage gets out one line that I think underscores her arc, asking why, if humans hate her kind so much, they made her anyway. As a created thing, she wants to have a purpose, extrinsically given to her by her creator, which she can then fulfill. This is essentially the crux of her tempestuous emotional state until, at the very end, she’s finally happy that she’s a “complete Third” now that she’s been knocked up.
For all that Armitage III is a cyberpunk action thriller, it’s the romance that actually provides the backbone of the most fulfilled and fulfilling character arc.
And if we stop there and just talk about the OVAs, Armitage III gets an A-. I had to think long and hard about it, and I decided to err on the side of generosity this time. Armitage III isn’t quite on the level of the absolute greats of the genre, but the absolute greats of the cyberpunk genre are, well, great. In my mind, they’re some of the most impactful stories of the modern era, capturing both a moment of a specific technological zeitgeist and a timelessness of imagination and philosophy. You can’t force a show to match up to Serial Experiments Lain or Blade Runner just to get into the A bracket.
And, further, it’s clear that Armitage has a vision of what it wants to be. It sets its sights a little lower, but in exchange it loves every frame it spends milking the more exploitative elements. It’s honest, comfortable in its own skin, and uncompromising in its vision, unafraid to package high ideas alongside shlock. And, credit where it’s due, that works pretty well.
Dual Matrix
So remember how I said there was a summary movie of Armitage III called Poly Matrix? Well, there’s also a sequel movie (explicitly a sequel to the OVAs) called Dual Matrix that continues the story. How does that go?
Well, we start out years later, on the 6th birthday of Armitage and Sylibus’s daughter, Yoko. Armitage receives a transmission letting her know that someone is trying to revive the Third program on Earth… and someone else is slaughtering to cover it up. This leads to her shortly going there to snoop after it in the gun-heavy way to which is accustomed.
Meanwhile, Sylibus’s gig as a security guard blows his cover to a friendly old man who wants to send him to Earth as well, in order to act as a representative at a summit. Seems like an odd pick but okay.
Armitage tracks down a military man responsible for the raid on the Third lab, only to be confronted by the real antagonist, a businessman called Demitrio who wants to get into the slave market with robots capable of reproduction. She comes away from the confrontation in pretty bad shape, ending up in the dubious care of a crazy eccentric repairman named Mouse.
Demitrio sabotages the Robot Rights vote by kidnapping Yoko (who came to Earth with Syllibus, because evidently there are no trustworthy sitters on Mars) and holding her hostage against his vote. He tries to get Armitage’s data out of Mouse, but all this does is maul Mouse and send Demitrio towards Yoko for his information on how Armitage could conceive, since his clones seem to not have the required capabilities. I’d think that would be more of a cell culture problem than a code problem, but far be it from me to say how Thirds work.
Some hired goons try to eliminate Sylibus when he wants his daughter back, which turns into a chase with some extremely dated CGI involved. This is when Armitage catches up, taking out their attack helicopter.
After a brief time together to lament their parenting abilities, our returning heroes do what every 90’s action parent does and run and gun their way into the villain’s lair in order to rescue their kidnapped daughter. This results in Armitage fighting a big robot while Sylibus finds the freezer Yoko has been stuffed in and pries it open.
Armitage gets to face Demitrio, kick him in the balls for good measure, and reveal the secret of how a Third can have a child: It’s love. Or, as Demitrio puts it…
I kind of think it might have something to do with egg cells, but you do you, Dual Matrix.
This isn’t the end of the film yet, though – we’ve got one more set piece as the family needs to make it to the top of a disused orbital elevator in order to board their escape shuttle to Mars.
Just getting out of the evil lair is bad enough, with Armitage having to fight off two of her clones that Demitrio prepared, and also having to deal with her daughter having trouble dealing with mom having an injury that reveals her robotic nature. This leads to Armitage staying behind for the fight while Sylibus and Yoko go ahead.
Try asking Shiro Emiya
Armitage manages to link up with Mouse, who helps her out presumably because Demitrio left him for dead, but the clones catch up to Sylibus even as Yoko’s apparent photographic memory helps him stay half a step ahead each time he fights them off. Armitage realizes the peril her daughter is in, and has Mouse basically overclock her combat ability, giving her an overdrive that will make her insanely powerful but that also might kill her if she pushes it too hard.
Thus, Armitage arrives at the elevator and goes for round two against her copies. We also learn that Mouse was handed her memory data on Demitrio’s misdeeds around faking a major crisis, which is sent to the news to begin his downfall and prop up robot rights that he tried to trample on.
The last third of the movie is basically this huge on and off battle, until we reach the point where Armitage uses said trump card, and Yoko decides to recognize her mom and give a pep talk that finishes the emotional arc that started with Yoko freaking out. The last clone is given an express ticket downwards, and the family escapes back to Mars.
Julian, still a digital ghost, even gives his second cameo to possess one of the clones and kill off Demitrio, preventing him from shooting the shuttle down in the process. In the wake of events, it seems that Mars moves forward with gaining some ocean views (like robot rights, a point of contention Earth wanted to defeat in order to keep Mars as a dependent colony) and a scene after the credits even reveals that Mouse salvaged one of the Armitage clones for himself, so I guess that’s a kind of payment for his good work. The end.
So, Dual Matrix was… not as strong as Armitage III on the whole. I’ll skip to the letter grade and give it a B on its own.
However, I think it elevates the whole package. The sense of futility is soothed by Dual Matrix. Not only do we see Armitage and Sylibus’s kid, but we get to kill off an antagonist and do something for Martian Independence, meaning that at every level of scope, something was accomplished. There are still big issues in the setting, the future of an integrated society being chief among them, but it’s fine to not answer everything.
That said, Dual Matrix has writing that’s less adroit and a visual design that’s less imaginative (largely taking place in future Chicago that looks like every other future city, rather than the rather unique Martian design of the OVAs) and executed less well. Armitage III wore its age pretty well, looking more stylish than dated. Dual Matrix is the other way around, which is kind of astounding given that this was supposed to be the cinematic experience. I would recommend that if you liked Armitage III and perhaps wanted a little more closure, Dual Matrix is a good followup, but even beyond it being a sequel I can’t say it really stands up on its own.
And one tiny little side note: the line I referenced in the title, the full version of which is “This story is dedicated to all those cyberpunks who fight against injustice and corruption every day of their lives” originates from Hideo Kojima’s Snatcher, despite its recent reuse. If you already knew that, give yourself a treat! If you didn’t, now you do; enjoy your useless trivia!