Life in the wake of World War III isn't pretty for some, as we see during Appleseed's opening firefight in a ruined city, where robots quickly wipe out a group of outgunned men and women. Only an agile blonde named Deunan Knute survives, thanks to some sudden help from a swarm of mech-suited soldiers led by Briareos, a rabbit-eared cyborg, and Hitomi, a smiling young girl who, in the first of many unexcused lines, openly remarks on how beautiful Deunan is.

Deunan's rescuers hail from the city of Olympus, a glistening metropolis where humans mingle with genetically tailored “bio-roids” to uneasily peaceful effect. Hitomi, a bio-roid herself, drags Deunan around the city and introduces her to the governing powers, which consist of a businesslike, middle-aged director named Athena, a dozen floating old men, and a benevolent supercomputer called Gaia. Deunan remains far more interested in Briareos, who's apparently her former comrade and lover, transplanted into a cyborg body after a battlefield accident.

Appleseed's strongest suit is a mix of cell-shading and less experimental CG backdrops, even if it resembles an Xbox 360 title more than contemporary anime. The characters move with a fluidity rarely seen in traditionally animated movies, but they all look a bit too polished, a bit too perfect, to be comfortable. Still, there's an unexpected side-effect: the over-glossy look fits a film about a suspiciously pleasant city of the future.

The future: secretaries and multi-eyed rabbit robots. Also, everyone's made of wax.

It's a pity that the writing's just as artificial. Deunan barely has time to register as the heroine before she's run through an exposition-heavy car chase, a battle with monowire-wielding androids, and training for her new job in the Olympus SWAT equivalent. Most of her problems are caused by Colonel Hades, an Olympus military leader with Aryan looks, an unironic name, and a pathological dislike of the bio-roids and their possible superiority to emotionally unpredictable humans like him. Hades' sentiments are shared by his comrade-in-arms General Uranus (stop laughing), who routinely squabbles with the city's bio-roid leadership, and they've hatched a cunning plot to violently wipe out bio-roids using the city's own defenses. This would, if anything, prove a need for genetically mollified humans, but Hades and Uranus are too evil for logic.

While Appleseed's been dubbed incoherent by some, I'd actually peg it as understandable yet wearingly by-the-numbers, with only occasional forays into implausible plot-fuckery. The film slides through a double-edged secret, an abrupt betrayal followed by even more abrupt forgiveness, and a climactic battle that pits Deunan and Briareos against the city's automated, spider-legged tanks and, of all things, a stubborn laptop keyboard. And that's not half as silly as the scene in which we learn that Hitomi, being a bio-roid, needs to get a life-extending treatment every few years, and that she just happened to forget about it for three whole days.

Things might be better if Appleseed had a sense of humor, but unlike Shirow's original manga, Aramaki's film doesn't know when to laugh at itself. Even the original Appleseed anime, a drab 1988 OVA that was widely and justly panned, understood that. And without anything to connect us to the characters, Appleseed's sense of alienation and its vision of the future are thoroughly flat. Why care about a war between humans and bio-roids when both sides act like robotically written puppets?

But even when the script fails him, Aramaki, a veteran of Bubblegum Crisis and other '80s puffery, provides impressive gunfights and cyborg slugfests. His efficient, clean approach is helped by a soundtrack from Tetsuya Takahashi (the composer, not the ousted creator of Xensoaga) and electronica mixers like Paul Oakenfold and the two-man Boom Boom Satellites. The voicework isn't bad, either. Ai Kobayashi fits Deunan quite well, as she was the heroine's motion-capture model as well as her actress. Jennifer Proud (who's apparently Jessica Straus) doesn't have the same advantage, but she's still spot-on, along with most of the other actors.

Promising it may have been, but Appleseed is simply too stiff to deliver anything except some fair action sequences and a look at animation techniques that, in all likelihood, will be refined and used in better movies. As an attempt to infuse cyberpunk themes with cutting-edge visuals, Appleseed ends up much like the bioengineering experiments of its story: phony, bland, and empty inside.