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VITALS:

Vexille-dvd-cover

DEBUT
2007 (Japan) 2007 (USA)
RUN TIME:
109 minutes
RATING:
PG-13 (violence, brief language)
FORMATS:
DVD, BluRay (Navarre Funimation)
TAGLINE:
2067: Isolation. 2077: Revelation


Vexille is the name of a Japanese anime film released in 2007, that shared common directors, musical composers, CGI animation techniques, and even some plot elements, with Shirow Masamune's Appleseed, although it is completely unrelated to both Masamune and his saga.


Produced by Fumihiro Sori (producer of the 2004 Appleseed movie) with music written primarily by Paul Oakenfold (also a contributor in the 2004 episode), Vexille deals with similar subject matter along the line of human endangerment, only this time not owing to organic genetic alteration (i.e. tweaking humankind's DNA and producing perfect "bioroids,") but rather the threat of a virus that causes inorganic cellular mutation, and the gradual transformation of normal human flesh into biometal (and essentially, resulting in the production of a sentient android).


Premise[]

In the late 2020s, Japan emerges as a dominant world player in the field of robotics. Following acquisition of all domestic competitors, a mega-conglomorate known as Daiwa begins to reveal that it is now holds the ability to produce a perfect android, that is, a human-like machine that features perfect intelligence, emotional emulation (and the appearance that it's a conscious being), and regenerative capabilities, such as the ability to heal itself when damaged. So convincing is the exclusive Japanese technology that the attention of the United Nations is piqued, and fearing domination and ethical concerns, the multinational body tables anti-android production legislation, which is later passed and ratified almost unanimously. Politically, Japan objects to the new law, and upon Daiwa's request, quickly withdraws from the UN, and adopts a North-Korean style policy of national isolation from the rest of the world. With the exception, that is, of heavily limited trade with the United States and other superpowers that are dependent on permissible robotic products it produces.


By 2067, the isolation policy is finalized and perfected. A microwave shield, christened RACE, is erected around the island of Honshu, and obscures all visual and communication links to the country. To spy satellites and the naked eye, the landmass is obscured in what looks like electrostatic snow. One heavily guarded opening in the curtain exists, a marine passageway that allows for freighter traffic and trade with the free world. Immigration and emigration is banned: those who remain on the island do not leave, and outsiders do not enter.


The strategy seemed perfect for ten years, until, unbeknownst to Japanese political authorities and Daiwa (whom, by now were nearly one in the same entity), a sentient, and contraband android, hides inside a US-bound freighter loaded with mechanical drone soldiers, and disembarks in San Pedro, California. Attempting to leak secrets about Daiwa, robotic guards from the freighter kill the android, but not before, it whispers to security officials that there will be secret meeting between Daiwa's second-in-command, and representatives of nearly every major superpower, in a mansion atop a peak called Mount Filar. When the informant begins to bleed black "blood," revealing that he is one of the inhuman androids banned nearly a decade earlier, SWORD (a US paramilitary force, and this movie's equivalent to ESWAT) is alerted, and sent to prevent the meeting from occurring.


The intervention turns bloody as SWORD encounters fierce resistance from Daiwa guards, and following that, even from Saito, the Daiwa company rep, who attempts to dispatch his American pursuers with a high-caliber light machine gun. Vexille Serra, the heroine of the film and leader of the SWORD platoon, grabs Saito by the throat and tries to choke him into submission, only to be thwarted. The wing of a Japanese aircraft slices through the room Saito is hiding in, and, grabbing onto a handle on the wing's underside, is whisked away. Vexille grabs a hold of his leg, and is carried off into the night sky.


Losing his grip from the handle, Saito pulls out a large knife from his suit, and calmly severs his own right leg, the one Vexille is holding onto. As she crashes to earth, it becomes sinisterly apparent that Saito, once human, has been recreated as an android. Or, as SWORD finds out several days later, upon examining the remainder of his thigh and shin, that he has been transformed, from the inside out, into biometal. Thus, it becomes a vital necessity to penetrate the RACE shield, and reveal to the world what evils have developed in Japan during the last decade of international secrecy. What they are soon to find out is that of near apocalyptic proportions, and that Honshu is now little more than a desert ravaged by freakish metallic earthworms known as Jags, and that Tokyo—or what remains of it—is populated entirely by semi-human androids slowly succumbing to an engineered virus that will soon erase their consciousness.



Vexille_2077_Official_trailer
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