3/4  Looking good.
Some of the finest eye candy ever put on film and a surprisingly interesting plot make this one a must see. I don't know what kind of technique was used here, seems like a cross between cel-shading and rotoscoping but the results were so ... (read full)

3/5 Wait, she's Vexille?
  by Slade Eide-Ettaro (Los Angeles, CA USA)
I was expecting Vexille to be something interesting, a codename for some kind of robot or android, it turned out all it was, is the main character's name. This movie is from the same team that brought Appleseed and Ex Machina to the world and they're up to their usual visual brilliance here. Despite the excellent graphical designs and cinematography though, the story is a little flat footed and by the half-way point I found myself caring less about the protagonist and more about those around her who we see very little of aside from their brief appearances in relation to her. The audience is never given any reason to like or relate to Vexille and in fact she comes off as little more than an annoyance frequently enough during her interactions with the other characters who seem far more central to the plot than she ever does. Another issue with the story, is how rushed everything seems, the audience is literally whisked from location to location with little or no regard for pacing and by the end you're left wondering what exactly has happened as you've been given no downtime during the film itself to consider what the story is trying to get at. Despite these shortcomings, the Appleseed team is able to create an impressive world view when the movie slows down enough for you to appreciate it and there are moments which are just as powerful as either of the Appleseed movies. So if you're a fan of those two films, or just of the Appleseed team, take a look at Vexille you might find it to your liking, or you might feel like you've just suffered storyboard whiplash. I suffered the latter effect, and plan to watch the movie a few more times.

5/5 A very pleasant surprise
  by M. Clark
Taking the advise of a friend I downloaded this movie and once it was over I purchased it less than 10 mins later!

The animation is great, the story is great, the action is great, the concept is great...... etc. I personally was blown away by the movie and wish that the entire director team and production team come out with many more movies and SOON!

3/5 Vexatious
  by E. A Solinas (MD USA)
It doesn't come as a huge surprise that "Vexille" is from the people who brought the world "Appleseed" and its even better sequel "Appleseed Ex Machina." The cyberpunk flavor, the big mecha, and the futuristic world of politico-techno conflict are all firmly in place, along with some pretty slam-bang action sequences and a darker, grittier feeling. It's a pretty entertaining story -- now if only it had fleshed out the main cast a little more.

About seventy years in the future, the world is worried about the advancement of robotics technology. So the UN orders them restricted, and Japan decides to cut itself off from the rest of the world.

But ten years later, a biomechanical leg shows the UN just what has been going on in Japan. So the American tech police known as SWORD are sent into Japan to find out if the isolated country has been doing illegal robotics research, which no other country allows. They aren't, and the movie ends there. Seriously, the Daiwa Corporation has decided to guide mankind's evolution through machinery, and the the SWORD agents are met with a very warm, nasty welcome.

After being rescued by the rebel Maria, Vexille finds that the biorobotics Daiwa Corporation has reduced the once-proud Japan to a vast, barren slum devoid of truly human life. Even worse, a nanotech "vaccine" transforms the Japanese into mindless machines. Vexille's only hope of saving herself -- and her lover Leon -- is to join forces with a small band of rebels before Japan is completely destroyed by Daiwa.

"Vexille" is a very different animal from the "Appleseed" movies. While it has the nimble shiny mecha and exploding buildings, the focus is on political machinations and evil corporations whose morality makes your hair stand on end. There's no utopia here for our tough heroine -- it's more like one of the outer circles of Dante's Hell.

The scenes in Vexille's home are colourful and streamlined, set in a futuristic city. But things get darker soon, taking us to the sickly yellow light and shabby shanty town of Japan, and things don't lighten up. And that devastated Japan is a pretty brilliant creation, both in its decayed misery and in the bleak future that its few remaining "fragments of humanity" have. The big flaw: the characters spend loooooong stretches of the movie just grimly talking to each other, with too little action.

Fortunately when there IS action, the fight scenes are top-notch in quality -- it has exploding buildings, missiles, battling mecha and chases through a marketplace. The fight scenes grow in intensity as Vexille and Maria reach the climactic confrontation with the Big Bad Guy. And the semi-apocalyptic finale is both shocking and inevitable -- as well as a helluva way to end a movie.

And then there's the jags, which are also quite cool -- giant wormlike masses of technology and metal that devour anything they come across. Not only are they wonderfully freaky, but they come across as a sort of cyber-sandworm from "Dune." Lovely.

And the animation is pretty astounding, though it has an oddly rotoscoped look in some action scenes. It's detailed and gloriously vivid, despite its grimy, shadowy look. And that includes exquisite details like snowflakes being individually swept from a windshield, or a reflection in a transparent helmet -- or even a smooth-skinned, nimble mecha exploding into a building with almost stunning speed. This glorious look almost makes up for the stretches of relatively action-free plot.

Perhaps its biggest weakness is in the characterization. It feels like they put a lot of effort into creating lifelike-looking characters. But despite the spunky Vexille and some touching moments from the Japanese cyborgs, the characters never quite come alive. Call it the "Final Fantasy: Spirits Within" effect. The best-rounded character is probably Maria, the tragic rebel leader who also provides a little romantic tension for our elf-faced heroine.

"Vexille" is a flawed little semiprecious gem -- brilliant animation, a tough heroine and mildly horrific Japan. Flawed, but has plenty of chills and explosions.

4/5 If you liked Appleseed...
  by Ana Mardoll (United States)
Vexille / B0012Z5UM0

*Spoilers*

For anime fans, this will be an easy decision: Did you enjoy Appleseed and Appleseed Ex Machina? If so, you will enjoy 'Vexille'. The look and feel of 'Vexille' is almost identical to 'Appleseed', but that's not necessarily a bad thing. There's the same short-haired tough-as-nails military chick who's been poured into a suit of power armor; there's the same underlying (and ironic) suspicion against technology and that it might one day control us. And, of course, we have humans who aren't really humans. What more could you possibly ask for?

If you haven't seen the 'Appleseed' movies or are new to anime in general, 'Vexille' is not a bad place to start. The budget for this movie must have been *huge* by anime standards because everything looks incredibly beautiful and the voice acting is professional and smooth. I'd even say that 'Vexille' is a BETTER introduction into this style of movie than 'Appleseed', because the introductory scene setting is much simpler, and with a lot fewer dead or presumed-dead people to keep track of. That's always a plus.

Not that 'Vexille' is without faults. The plot is extremely predictable at several points, and sometimes this is problematic, because I can't tell whether the movie means to be predictable or not. For instance, the 'evil replacement humans' at the beginning is announced so obviously that they might as well have run a scroll text at the bottom of the screen to that effect, so that seems like an intentional reveal rather than a sloppy set-up, and it kind of works - since the 'twist reveal' doesn't occur until much later, the viewer is left wondering why, exactly, the switcheroo (assuming it isn't forgotten in all the explosions between the beginning and the ending). And the old "girlfriend left behind" chestnut is so overused that even the *main character* sees it coming a mile away, and while it IS nice to have sensible characters for once, the lack of surprise or suspense does kind of prevent complete immersion in the movie. The few golden moments of shock and surprise, for instance the internal state of Japan, tend to get lost in the really idiotic 'twists' that the writers didn't think through - like the completely ridiculous premise that a person could live completely surrounded by androids without them catching on that their companion was human. *eyeroll*

I'm being overly critical, though, as usual. 'Vexille' is a good, solid movie and a good addition to any anime collection and I recommend it. I will note, though, that 'Vexille' falls into the same trap as so many anime movies and doesn't bother to match the English subtitles for the hearing impaired to the actual spoken English dubs, which is very vexing for people like me who use the subtitles to follow the action. Oddly, we actually preferred the spoken dialogue to the written subtitles, which is strange because it usually goes the other way around with anime movies, in my experience.

1/5 The filmmakers left their brains at the door
  by Richard K. S. Baer (Chicago, IL United States)
Vexille starts out promising with its interesting premise: Japan essentially removes itself from the rest of the world to pursue unchecked robotic research on its citizens. Everything else is terrible. There are a few cool moments of action, but they completely ape other, better films (most notably the recent Appleseed movies--despite what it says on the box, none of the major creative talent on those films worked on Vexille).

Willing suspension of disbelief is required for all sci-fi films, but Vexille asks far too much from its audience. It presents one ridiculous scenario after another (the most common of which are the desert sand worms made out of rapidly spinning chunks of metal). Technical designs are strange as well. The suits the film's heroes wear have a helmet design that, if created in real life, would only serve to impair the wearer's vision (and be very heavy at the same time). Things like that just don't make sense.

Vexille isn't even good as mindless fluff. I, personally, cannot stand to have my intelligence insulted by a film (especially one I watch voluntarily). Vexille starts doing it in the first few minutes and doesn't stop until the credits roll.