n Armitage III Polymatrix, world-weary detective Ross Sylibus first met attitudinal super-cop Naomi Armitage, a nearly human third-generation robot who dressed like jailbait and fought like a battle-mecha on speed. Unlike standard second-generation robots, Armitage and the "Thirds" like her had imagination and emotions. In her case, the chief emotion was fury. But in the
sequel, Armitage: Dual-Matrix, Armitage has calmed down a great deal, taken the gigantic chip off her shoulder and traded in the leather hot pants for an apron. She and Sylibus live quietly together on Mars, with their 4-year-old daughter, Yoko.
But one day, while cooking Yoko's birthday dinner, Armitage is suddenly struck with a vision—the first-person experiences of a Third on Earth, who dies as soldiers raze the installation where she was secretly built. Armitage quietly leaves home and heads for Earth to investigate, without briefing her husband or daughter first. In Chicago, she watches news reports claiming that the facility was destroyed by the military after the Thirds being built there ran amok,
killing virtually all of their creators and posing a threat to the outside world. Knowing this is a blatant lie, Armitage tracks down the head of the mission to demand the truth. That line of inquiry abruptly dead-ends, but she encounters a new adversary—Demitrio Mardin, a megalomaniacal businessman with a morbid interest in Armitage's ability to bear children. He wants the secret of her
reproductive ability, he explains, so he can design robots that can create humans—"the ultimate product." Such robot-manufactured humans, he believes, would be utterly biddable, like second-generation robots, and could form the perfect army.
Meanwhile, an on-the-job incident pushes Sylibus back into the limelight after years of operating under an assumed identity. Soon he's being shuttled to Earth as a representative in a larger political confrontation between Earth and Mars. Before he can find Armitage and brief her, he and Yoko become pawns in Mardin's scheme. Before long, they're being chased by the most dangerous enemies imaginable—exact copies of Armitage, cloned from her specifications, but with no purpose other than pursuit and murder.
Artificial images, but real emotions
The first Armitage film leaned a bit too heavily on mismatched-buddy-cop clichés and unlikable characters whose primary personality trait was leaden anger. Dual-Matrix suffers slightly from the latter syndrome—Armitage and Sylibus are both very internal people who don't
share or express much, either to each other or the audience—but it goes much farther in
revealing the hidden faces behind the dispassionate masks. And even when the protagonists are sticking to their tough-guy pretenses, they're far more reserved and mature this time around. Armitage in particular is both more convincing and more engaging as a strong, angst-filled, silent type than she was as the foul-mouthed juvenile delinquent of the first film.
The animation, however, takes some getting used to. The character designs in particular are heavy and rigid, drawn with thick dark lines that set them apart from their environment. Their exaggerated features (Armitage's huge eyes, Sylibus' outsized nose, Mardin's knife-edged facial planes) at times make them look like caricatures. The backgrounds are beautiful and the color throughout is marvelous, but the characters themselves look synthetic and unyielding. The heavy use of digital pans and zooms, and computer-generated sets and vehicles, also gives the film an artificial look, not dissimilar to that of Ghost in the Shell.
The dub is handled well; Elizabeth Berkeley and Kiefer Sutherland aren't back to reprise their roles as Armitage and Sylibus, but Strange Days and Natural Born Killers star Juliette Lewis picks up the Armitage reins in suitably aggressive fashion. (Ahmed Best, as the voice of a quirky robotics specialist, is also on hand to prove that he doesn't need to be playing Jar Jar Binks in order to be squeaky and annoying.) But the film's best moments don't need voiceovers at all. Armitage's relationship with her daughter, a key point of the film, is handled in a particularly touching and sophisticated manner. As the film lurches through a terrifying, protracted confrontation between Armitage and her killer clones, Armitage and Yoko's interactions become almost entirely non-verbal, and it's clear that while Armitage does love her daughter, that love has not made it easier for her to open up. Armitage: Dual-Matrix is mostly about exciting, violent surfaces, but in this one aspect, it redeems itself as a story about human beings, both organic and artificial.
Armitage: Dual-Matrix comes in two flavors: the movie-only edition and the special edition, which includes a character-design gallery, a short, standard making-of featurette, a character guide and a musical mode that plays three clips from the soundtrack. Except for the music player, which is fairly cool for anime-music fans who don't want the soundtrack CD, these are all pretty minor, standard extras, so it's questionable whether they're worth the extra $10 to anyone but the most insistent completists.
— Tasha
Back to the top.
