For fans of sci-fi anime with an abstruse and dystopian bent, Mardock Scramble: The First Compression may make for an interesting selection. The anime film, both in narrative and visual style, lures viewers into a foreign and corrupt, futuristic city where one young woman is forced to get a little dirty if she's to clean up her town. Distributed by Section23 Films this month, the anime presentation Mardock Scramble is a violent and at times formless observation of how some people deal with vengeance (give or take a few cybernetic modifications along the way).
Rune Balot, a young woman whose lot in life hasn't amounted to much, has come to live under the care of particular man. This man, called Shell, has an habit of thriving on the excesses of Mardock City. Shell's reputation is fierce, leaving his subordinates (or human property, for that matter) with little room for suspicion.
As such, it should then come as no surprise that Balot, after curiously digging into the man's past and future political motives, finds herself killed by way of an exploding car at Shell's order. On the surface, Balot is just another dead teenage prostitute; however, her dystopian city isn't ready to let her go quite so soon.
As Mardock Scramble continues, the girl is brought back to life as a cyborg thanks in large part to Mardock City's "Scramble 09" ordinance.... an underground, by-all-means-necessary edict used by shadowy authority to find and kill the worst of the worst.
In the case of Balot, her cybernetic assassin abilities are the latest benefit of this "authority," while the mysterious and malignant Shell, wanted by all sorts of officials, is by far the city's "worst of the worst." Mardock Scramble: The First Compression is a sixty-minute presentation coming to DVD on September 27, 2011 ($29.98). The Section23 Films release will contain both English and Japanese language audio tracks. The title's Blu-ray Disc release is scheduled for sometime 2012.
Now blessed with a second chance at life, if only as a mute weapon with a frightening talent for carving up the bad guys, Balot is tasked with hunting down Shell and his ilk. The ensuing trudging through gutter after gutter, and ensuing extermination of villain after villain, gives the young woman ample reason to keep on cleaning things up: she's already this far in, she can't stop now.
The Mardock Scramble film is one of a purported trilogy, mirroring the series of novels authored yester-decade by Tow Ubukata. "First Compression" is a 2010 production, and attempts to wade deep into Ubukata's original musings on the human condition and its often-frail rationalization of hope when given little or no amenable social context.
Mardock Scramble: The First Compression does its best to further complicate things for the girl, tossing in the requisite private investigators, eccentric cyber-tech scientists, and human experimentation industrial complexes.
Visually, the film's beautiful but deceptive yellow- and blue-green hues fill the atmosphere with a peculiar but ultimately quite dangerous sense of the surreal.