Expelled From Paradise

Alt title: Rakuen Tsuihou: Expelled From Paradise

Movie (1 ep x 104 min)
2014
3.766 out of 5 from 3,620 votes
Rank #2,503

The story takes place in the future when humanity's new paradise, the cyber universe "DEVA's" mainframe is hacked by a mysterious hacker from Earth. DEVA's high officials dispatched Angela Balzac, a DEVA system security officer, down to the Earth's surface to investigate the situations srrounding this mysterious hacker. What are the hacker's motives? Angela descends on to the devestated surface riding her exoskeletal powered suit Arhan.

Source: Aniplex USA

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Reviews

ThatAnimeSnob
3.5

The only reason I even bothered to check out this movie was because the name Urobuchi was slapped on. Who needs more reasons than that, right? I mean, ok, the trailer looked luring enough by showing a girl with long twin tails and super revealing clothes riding a mecha and blowing shit up. Clear evidence that it has to be a super mature and thought provoking title, like everything else Urobutcher was part of. Such as the mature themes of belly dancing in Gargantia, the archer class being made of archers in Fate / Stay Night, and who can forget the totally neutral Sybil System of Psycho Pass which turned super evil in the second season? Yup, depth and maturity awaits us in this movie too. Plus the whole thing was made in off-putting CGI, so it would be interesting to see how they are going to mess it up as they always do. The movie begins by making sure that the audience will view the heroine as a sex object, rather than a character with modesty and respect. Here she is, in bikini on some beach, where a guy that is meant to be us, self-inserting our desires on him, is trying to seduce her. Out of nowhere some virus pops up and she goes after it… completely naked. Yeah, who needs clothes to chase something in the virtual world, of course and it makes sense that she would be naked. Just don’t bother to ask why she needs to have a body at all and not to simply be sprites. Whoops, you shouldn’t have realized that, so here are some uncensored boobies with nipples to make sure it never crosses your mind.She fails to stop the virus thingy so she goes to her superiors, by wearing her battle uniform. Because she totally needs clothes all of a sudden. Said uniform is equally revealing as her bikini from before, so basically she doesn’t hide a damn thing. Might as well be naked. So, her superiors look like Gods from various religions. Owww, such depth and maturity to just slap on theological imagery that has absolutely nothing to do with religion. This is totally no excuse to be pretentious by throwing in mambo jumbo terminology and make it look important because RELIGIONS MAAAAN.She decides to get a physical body and go investigate this virus thing. Because so far she was just ethereal or something, living in a virtual world. Again, don’t ask why she needs a body, much less one that is barely dressed that goes totally commando when chasing viruses. To make sure such a thing will never cross your mind once again, feast your eyes on her new body, a loli one, with super extra long twin tails that would completely hinder all her movements if the movie gave a damn about physics. She is again butt naked, with uncensored nipples. Any reason for why it looks like a walking fapping excuse and not as a modestly dressed male agent or something like that? Kachin! Yes weeboos, this waifu can take the shape of any fetish you desire, go buy her merchandise.So after she lands on the psysical realm and proving what a complete moe klutz that you would love to protect she is, an encounter with desert monsters takes place. She gets into her mecha, and flies into action! As usual, the CGI looks nice during battle scenes but the whole thing is completely ruined by the simple fact that the mecha is a ball with small legs and arms popping up around it. Jeez, this is a shape you give to small comical robot mascots, not to the titular robot. And it’s really hard to be excited about the action when the camera gives us gratuitous butt shots of a twin tail loli. After the completely bogus battle, we get to see Rie Kugimiya doing her usual snict by voicing a stereotypical tsundere, constantly angry at a cool guy who clearly knows far more than her, but she is too much of a bitch to admit it. She would make a fine harem girl in any run of the mill school comedy. Just like any other identical role Rie Kugimiya did. They go to a city where everybody wears worn out clothes and looks like a cowboy. She of course sticks out from everybody else with her ridiculous twin tails and fetish outfit to the point people can mistake her for a whore. It makes complete sense why some of them try to rape her in an alley. And turns out she is completely useless in hand-to-hand combat. Why did she even choose this pathetic frail body? Why was she even sent on this mission? Why couldn’t the cool guy be the protagonist? He is a much better character than this stupid stereotypical tsundere… Oh, I forgot, this is aimed at otakus. Nobody would watch the movie if that happened.What follows after that is boring and almost plotless. The movie literally wastes over half of its duration on crap that would make you fall asleep. No interesting action, no deep themes explored, not even butt shots to prevent the otakus from playing with their smart phones for the next hour. Something about the physical world being a fun place and how the digital one is not, and the superiors being douchebags for simply having authority. I don’t care movie; you zoomed on the twin tailed loli’s ass, remember?Eventually we get another flashy action scene, with that ridiculous roboballon fighting other roboballons. Just like before, there is no reason to care about a stereotypical tsundere in a lame robot fighting generic enemies. After that, the movie ends in a completely anti-climactic way. What a waste of 2 hours that was. TL;DR: This movie is awful, even as a braindead action flick. It doesn’t even feel like it had anything related to what Urobutcher is notorious about. All the characters, past the main two, you see in the poster and the action scenes of the trailer don’t get more than a few minutes of screen time, and even then fail completely to be memorable or interesting. The theme of reality being better to fiction is as superficial as it gets, since the protagonist is a generic tsundere loli and the villains are stereotypicaly evil because AUTHORITY MAAAAN! Don’t waste your time and money on it. And in case you waste them, don’t forget to give it a very low score.

quacker
5

Animation The movie is totally computer animated. There are sharp character designs that seem to have a limited number of moving parts. This means any single frame looks great out of context but you'll notice some awkward, robot-ish motion throughout the movie. Angela's hair floats about behind her like it's made of plastic, and she often has a bit of an awkward gait, as though her body parts were animated independently and then smushed together. It's like the characters were animated with whatever software is used to make visual novels. Nevertheless, the movie is beautiful. Battle effects (robots, laser blasters, etc) are fabulously animated, making for action scenes that are actually pretty fluid and intense. The robot/character designs and the scenery are detailed and definitely worthy of a feature-length film.My biggest complaint, actually, is that Angela is unnecessarily sexualized. Their action scene storyboarding went something like: BOOBS. BUTT. LEGS. ACTION. BOOBS. ACTION. THAT OTHER CHARACTER. BOOBS. Angela "Ballsack" Balzac is literally the only person walking around in her impractical, skin-tight, robot space-gymnast outfit, while everyone else is wearing a t-shirt and jeans. It feels out of place and gives the movie an air of immaturity (like, am I really supposed to be taking this seriously?) SoundI liked the soundtrack for the most part. It's mostly electronic/rock and some slower westerny selections with acoustic guitar (which are good) - about what you'd expect in universe with a digital cyber world orbiting a mostly-desolate Earth. Some tracks are too embellished and unbalanced and noisy, with too many different musical lines trying to overpower each other.Story (SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS)The plot itself is something we can work with. Most of humanity lives in DEVA, a digital paradise in which humans live free of their physical limitations. And then you have Gen Urobuchi (of Black Lagoon and Fate/* fame) and Seiji Mizushima (Evangelion, Fullmetal Alchemist, Gundam 00) working on this, so I was expecting something pretty good (this is actually the reason I watched the movie). But it's crap!Ultimately, the movie suffers from a lack of focus and depth. You never get a proper introduction to DEVA. At the start, Angela Balzac gets installed into a physical body and goes to Earth to find/eliminate a hacker who hacked into DEVA. She meets up with a dude named Dingo and learns the situation on Earth: its people fight to survive, having to eat giant sand worms and fight sickness and feel pain (unlike in DEVA). Then we go through Angela's tsundere-ness for twenty or thirty minutes as she gets used to her physical body and being out of her element. Over the course of the movie, Angela starts to learn DEVA isn't all it's cracked up to be, and why people might prefer to stay on Earth, in physical bodies.Okay. So, DEVA kind of sucks and Earth kind of sucks, so what are we doing about it? Well...nothing, actually. The movie goes on to address the question, "what is humanity?". It turns out the hacker is named "Frontier Setter", a friendly AI who developed consciousness. Frontier Setter is trying to leave the galaxy! He turns out to be more "human" than Angela is - he knows love, he likes music (which earlier Angela calls "noise"), he wants friends, and he has ambition. They briefly, for one line of the movie, consider Angela's humanity: she's a digital personality - a computer program - stored somewhere. What makes her more or less human than this AI that knows love? (answer, I guess: "Well, she looks human. She has a body and DNA!" Which is lame). But the dialogue fails to touch on the nitty-gritty details like, say, Ghost in the Shell.To wrap things up, instead of actually addressing any of the real issues, the last twenty minutes of the movie are all action. It's a dull ending, and it's a bit awkward, with nobody accompanying Frontier Setter on his journey despite all of his attempts to find a companion. It's nice that the movie tried to do more than simply exploring a cyberworld, but it's really kind of a mess.Characters (SPOILERS)Part of the reason the story sucks is because there are just three whole characters in the movie, and Angela is the only one changes her point of view. Dingo is a pretty experienced dude. He's made up his mind about DEVA and serves only to guide Angela straight to Frontier Setter. Frontier Setter needs to "prove his existence" by building a spaceship and leaving the galaxy to bring humanity to other places. Angela initially thinks DEVA is paradise - strictly better than life on Earth - and Dingo convinces her otherwise.That's it. The entire movie. All you need to know. There's not much substance to these three characters. The dialogue between them does have a bit here and there to munch on, but it's not much. It's like they decided people only want a pretty tsundere girl, because that's really all they give you.ConclusionI've elaborated on everything bad about this movie so far, but it really does have fantastic animation, despite some quirkiness. I was expecting more from it, given the reputations of some of the production staff, so I'm kind of disappointed/bitter. I do like the soundtrack as well. It's not a bad movie if you need to kill some time. If you can get over Angela's stupid character design or if somehow you've never watched any anime that considers the ramifications of a cyberworld, then Expelled from Paradise is good grab. For everyone else, you might as well watch Ghost in the Shell.

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