Then, acting on a mysterious tipoff, the American commando "fighting force" SWORD moves in on a meeting between various world leaders and a Daiwa rep who's left Fortress Japan. The outcome of that meeting leaves no doubt that Japan has been developing the forbidden android technology, so SWORD sets out to penetrate the border and find out what's going on. Heading up the mission is a SWORD agent named Leon, supposedly the last American to be booted from Japan. He has history there that he doesn't discuss, not even with his apparent girlfriend Vexille, another SWORD agent. Naturally, though, when he and his team make it through the energy barrier, some fairly significant surprises are waiting for them in Tokyo, including some that touch on Leon's past.

While Vexille is a stand-alone film, with no connection to the Appleseed universe, it's tightly tied to the 2004 Appleseed movie in fans' minds; Appleseed producer Fumihiko Sori directed Vexille and shared screenwriting credit with Appleseed scriptwriter Haruka Handa. Both films are full-CGI with a similar paints-over-motion-capture look. Both lean heavily on dark, Matrix-style green-and-black color schemes, with bullet-time fighting and Agent-esque bad guys. And both have similar themes. Just as American filmmakers never seem to get sick of films about grown men behaving like children, then learning to grow up just a little without losing their playfulness, Japanese filmmakers never seem to tire of questioning humanity's nature and purpose in a machine age, and asking whether all the machines we rely on will one day usurp our souls.

Smart robots, stupid people

It's odd that CGI anime doesn't seem to have improved since 2001's Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within; Appleseed and Vexille are both several steps backward from that movie visually, with stiff, puppety characters with plastic faces that land them firmly in the uncanny valley. Vexille does better with human motion than Appleseed, but for such a visually sophisticated film, it still looks pretty rigid and clumsy. Typically enough, the movie does a much more convincing and interesting job of rendering its robots, from giant battering-ram door openers to the little scurrying battle robots, vaguely reminiscent of a cross between The Phantom Menace's destroyer droids and Ghost in The Shell: Stand Alone Complex's little rolling Tachikomas.

But the real problem isn't how the humans look, it's how they act. Massive logic gaps abound in Vexille, perhaps best summarized with a scene in which the SWORD agents are told that they'll be disavowed if they're caught. Rather than painting over the telltale SWORD insignias on their battle suits, or using paint remover, they then sit down for a tedious, highly ineffectual group session of trying to stab the paint jobs off their suits with knives. Later, when the mission is compromised, Vexille takes shelter with a contact named Maria, but the heavily armed villains get wind of her location and descend on Maria's home—solely to dispense some empty threats. Clearly they don't understand how unjust fascist dictatorships work at all. It's frustrating how often people take actions that make no sense, simply because it's necessary to keep the plot going.

And speaking of that plot, it's clunky and leaden. Most of the film's attention seems to be focused on how sweet Vexille looks with her huge, sad, video-game-character eyes peering out from under a cloche hat, or through the visor slit in a helmet, but those eyes are the only expressive part of her one-dimensional character, and they can't carry the film on their own. The big explosive fight scenes could, perhaps, if they came more often, and if they weren't so clearly indebted to The Matrix. Watching that again would be a lot more fun than watching this the first time.