AKA: サイバーパンク エッジランナーズ

Genre: Sci-Fi

Length: Web release, 10 episodes, 25 minutes each

Distributor: Currently available streaming on Netflix.

Content Rating: TV-MA (Nudity, violence, gore, mature situations.)

Related Series: Based on a video game (see Notes)

Also Recommended: Battle Angel; Black Lagoon; Banana Fish. Also a non-Japanese animated movie, Heavy Metal, again if you like this sort of thing.

Notes: A Polish/Japanese co-production. Story by Rafal Jaki, based on a video game by CD Projekt Red, which is in turn based on the Cyberpunk 2077 universe created by Mike Pondsmith. According to Wiki, this ONA series is intended as a prequel to the game.

Rating:

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners

Synopsis

After the death of his mother- who wanted our hero David Martinez to rise in the hierarchy of the Arasaka Corporation- David instead ends up joining the underworld, aided by implanted hardware. He meets a girl (of course), but while she tries to help him, she has some issues of her own.

Review

A grungy, cruel, violent, dystopian world whose human population includes large numbers of cyborgs seems awfully familiar- in fact, it's ALSO the general scenario of Battle Angel, one of the shows that ushered me into anime. In THIS one, as ALSO in Battle Angel, everything is run by an oligarchic Corporation (or two; there does seem to be a rival one), and yet in BOTH shows the Corporations seem to be completely inept at maintaining order, and keeping the violence and cruelty under control. I was more forgiving of this in Battle Angel, since that one, in true Corporate style, outsourced crime control to independent contractors; this one has what is supposed to be a trained group of well-equipped Company employees. The fact that, at least in fiction, repressive oligarchies are so terrible at regulating the populace might provide some encouragement to those who face attempts by real oligarchical Corporate types to do real-life repression in a country. Not that this could ever happen in a democracy, of course...

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners throws in a few other ideas I recognized from other shows. The idea of selling digital records of people's memories for entertainment (?) was one I remember from the live-action film Strange Days, though here it's facilitated by so many having implanted hardware interfaces that allow them to insert the memories (on little memory cards/chips) into their brains. Some of our cast are also able to access the Network to obtain restricted info, as Naomi Armitage could in the Armitage franchise.

And yet Battle Angel remains, in my mind, superior to this one; for Ido and Gally (AKA Alita in the English manga) managed, despite all that happened to them, to retain their humanity- and earned our sympathy- while David, our main protagonist here, I wasn't so sure of. The main impression you get of him is of someone who's always in over his head.

Certainly his debut as an Edgerunner was not auspicious. He's been implanted with some hardware that gives him accelerated motion (and I would think would also require accelerated thought, to keep up with himself), but he bungles his first assignment. Let's be frank, excelling at Grand Theft Auto just isn't a great thing if your original objective was NOT to steal the car.

David's mom, by the way, wanted him to have the security of a position in the Arasaka Corporation, and did some questionable things to keep him in the expensive Corporation school. She had some connections with the gang he initially winds up with- they know her- a gang headed by a mammoth guy named Maine, who's always trying to add more tech to his body- maybe, in the end, NOT the best idea, at all.

Among Maine's gang, I have to admit that I kind of liked Rebecca, who reminded me of a diminutive version of DC's Harley Quinn. But the real leading lady in this one is named Lucy. Her backstory, when we hear it, reminded me of both Mumei's in Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress and Kuro's in In/Spectre. There may be some interesting intimate moments between Lucy and David (and by "intimate" I DO mean there's plenty of nudity here- remember, we're being seriously seinen.)

Anyway, as always seems the case in gritty crime dramas where nominal bad guys are the stars (Phantom: Requiem for the Phantom, Banana Fish, etc.) in the latter part of the story things start falling apart for our cast (particularly for David) as secrets, doubts (and of course secret doubts), as well as betrayals springing from personal ambitions, together leave our cast open to all-out attack, and there's the usual hyperkinetic climax, which I thought so over the top as to max out the absurdity scale, involving physics-defying collisions (real colliding vehicles just don't do some of these things), "bullet hell" scenes that would make Quentin Tarantino jealous, and explosions that would make Jerry Bruckheimer (the producer of famous "loud" films like Pearl Harbor and Armageddon) proud. When things get this ridiculous, I get into my "Oh, come ON, now!" dismissive mode. If this is, indeed, a prequel to the game, I think the game would require an almost entirely new cast.

Movie morality has always required the doom of anyone who kills an "innocent", and in some ways I'll just say that this one observes such traditions. I really wasn't that happy with the show's choices of who lived and who died, to be honest. So many of the plot elements here I've seen in other, better shows, and the whole melee at the end was just too much. I liked Lucy's character design (I guess Blade Runner was ANOTHER influence), but I never liked HER as much as the show wanted me to. But the show's diverting at times, and if you're a fan of "the old ultra-violence", you might enjoy it more than I did. — Allen Moody

Recommended Audience: Neflix sensibly rates TV-MA. Nudity's graphic (though as usual doesn't emphasize the pubes), and there's plenty of graphic violence and gore. I think those implants David keeps adding to himself must also give him extra blood, considering how much he spills.