Forum - View topicREVIEW: Psycho-Pass Season One Blu-Ray
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tuxedocat
 Posts: 2183 |
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Nah, Warhol already did that. Maybe not at the Louvre, but the Metropolitan Museum of Art. So yeah, still art. What trypticon said ^^^^ 
http://www.metmuseum.org/collections/search-the-collections/489409 |
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jojothepunisher
 Posts: 799 |
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Which is a shame. I want to recommend this show to one of my friends who likes psychological and philosophical stuffs, but I am hesitant in doing so because the show starts off really weak compared to what the series has to offer later on. |
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Ghost_Wheel
 Posts: 203 |
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On all the hamfisted literature references and the over the top drama in general: I don't think it's Gen Urobuchi trying to strut his smarts and convince you the show is good simply by making those references. There are many works that do that (albeit with less explicit calls), but the way in which this is executed drives me to believe there's more to the story. What I'd say it's really about is being an intellectual. Most of the criminals in the show have a passion they feel they need to express in a world that suppresses them, and Makishima's old fashioned notion of being well read is a pretty lonely dissent in the society he lives in. He only ever really gets to discuss the ideas that have been swimming (fermenting? festering?) in his head for years with a select few. I think a lot of who Makishima is and how he interacts with the world boils down to this notion of lonely dissent gone wrong. The art girl's arc, though my least favorite, also reeks of this theme. Her expression, her art, her philosophies and ideas were not only seen as old fashioned, but also dangerous. spoiler[At that's really the heart of the problem with the SIBYL system. If the goal is to survive and persist, but intellectualism and creativity aren't valued, the society is destined to remain stagnant, eventually fall out of equilibrium, and either explode or crumble. By restricting science as a method of control, you not only suppress the potential scientists, completely cutting them off from their potential and further isolating them from the rest of the world, you also don't protect the long term society. The SIBYL system is a collective of deviants, but they are deviants seemingly for the sake of being deviant rather than appearing to have any particular passion. They insist on creating a society that functions in spite of the idiosyncrasies of it's constituents. and carry a condescending air as a collective.] In contrast to all of this is Akane. dtm brings up that she's not very interesting until the second half. I happen to disagree wholeheartedly; I'd say she was a very strong personality right from the beginning. That aside, an interesting question to ask is at what point Akane becomes an intellectual or begins to express those tendencies. At the beginning she expresses how she waffled over her decision to join the police force, not really having a passion to speak of. She ends up joining out of respect for the common good. She was the only one who could lend her ability to that cause, so she did. Maybe she doesn't have that passion until later on but it is clear through her interactions with her coworkers and adversaries that she knows what she values in other people, society, and herself. She's a well reasoned, introspective person, and as such, is cool and level headed. And I think the message here is that a person like Akane could really do well in any society, in contrast to Makishima whose puzzle piece just doesn't fit anymore. Psycho-Pass is, while not perfect by any stretch, something which sits at the median of a certain kind of fiction that I sadly tend not to see much of anymore. It's inventive, gripping, and strikingly serious. I'm pretty excited for season two because I feel like we could break some new storytelling ground if it goes in a wacky enough direction. |
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Animegomaniac
Posts: 4082 |
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I'm really starting to think I'm on the wrong end of cyber punk; Hate Blade Runner, hate Ghost in the Shell the TV series but I like "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" and the Ghost in the Shell movie.
I have seen Psycho-Paths and I enjoyed it - through the first half {if the series doesn't portray the differences between privileged and poor like other dystopian works then why do all the crazies seem part of the Upper/elite class and the victims pare part of the working class? Is just a matter of spending personal time in a constructive manner?} but I would never actually buy it, watch it again or watch the second season. The problem is my own personal beliefs, no, that's too shallow. Personal convictions; A little freedom is necessary for the human soul to evolve and any society that has a death penalty is inherently flawed. And this one, that has a death penalty but no justice system? Ridiculous, no lawyer would allow it and we'd have an easier time getting rid of the cockroaches and rats than those vermin. Ah, my bias is showing. Those who will pick up the sword will die by the sword and if GU wants to play armchair sociologist in his own little world, fine, but it doesn't mean I have to swallow it. Or stand in awe of his brilliance. Sorry, I mean "brilliance". Or harvesting of other people's ideas. I mean "stealing". Don't get me wrong, the series is fine when it's wallowing in the lower depths of human psychosis and laughing with glee as the next human body is turned into a rapidly inflating corpse. But when it's start justifying itself as something more than lurid entertainment, when it starts proclaiming it has ideas, Psycho Pass drops the ball. "Why doesn't the system spoiler[work on certain individuals?] Because the system spoiler[wants them to join its collective.]" Why? ...otherwise we wouldn't have a conflict? Sad, the show's answer was that spoiler[more heads makes for a more infallible system and but there very fact that it creates a fault in the process invalidates the whole system right from the start - and where's the f***** oversight on those faults? Does the whole tech support team narrow down to one guy watching a green light, waiting for it to turn red?]. Makes me wish GU st- borrowed from Asimov rather than PK Dick. A positronic brain using the three robotic laws as applied to ... the police force. Oh, oh, does that mean I make my own anime? Oh right, I have to create other derivative works first, damn. Ok, right. I'll do a prequel to Air the TV, the 998th Summer and I'll do a work that deconstructs the harem "comedy". School Days, damn. OK, romantic comedy. |
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Agent355
 Posts: 5113 Location: Crackberry in hand, thumbs at the ready... |
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Hope Wrote
This is beautiful allegorical writing. Thank you for lifting up the experience of reading reviews! I still haven't seen Psycho-Pass. I'm a bit wary about something so dark, wordy and philosophical. I love Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, but no matter how many times I watch it, I'm never entirely sure that I get all the dialogue and concepts (could be because it's on at 3:30 am these days). But I'm definitely planning to give Psycho-Pass a shot. |
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TarsTarkas
 Posts: 5825 Location: Virginia, United States |
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Like many other professions, what you learned in college or an academy, is completely different than what is actually practiced on the job. This varies from job to job, and professions, but they are called rookies for a reason. |
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TarsTarkas
Posts: 5825 Location: Virginia, United States |
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I remember the sort of happy ending it had at the theaters and on the laserdisc. Guess I need to look for that version. |
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Apollo-kun
 Posts: 1213 Location: City 7, Macross 7 |
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In my opinion, it was kind of a pretentious show, from what I watched. It rode on the coattails of bigger, better works of science fiction, namely the writings of Dick, and the tone and atmosphere of "GITS:SAC." Also, I know the word "moe" was famously banned during the production by the staff, but I'll be damned if Akane cannot be summed up as "the moe police."
Still, I know a lot of people like it, and to each their own; as long as it stimulates interest in heady sci-fi shows, and gets more people interested in that sub-genre of anime, I don't see the point in hating it. Even though I actively disliked it, more power to anybody who could take something away from that I couldn't. 
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FlamingFirewire
 Posts: 461 |
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http://www.amazon.com/Runner-Anniversary-Collectors-Edition-Blu-ray/dp/B008M4MB8K/ There you go
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Juno016
 Posts: 2386 |
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I dunno. Psycho-Pass acknowledges what it borrows from before it goes in its own direction. I think that's quite the respectful way of doing it. I mean, Saya no Uta was the exact same way. A character references Hi no Tori, the main influence behind Saya no Uta (which gave it its framework), but for those that have read Tezuka's works and that particular chapter of Hi no Tori, Urobuchi's work still truly stands out as his own.
Psycho-Pass, to me, is the same. Its foundation is derived from a sea of predecessors, but what it tries to say is far different from what those works tried to say. Sure, "this society is bad" is the general idea of all of them, and it's the core mechanic that drives the sympathies of the audience, but it's not the message the show is trying to give. Minority Report let's us see that crimes aren't truly crimes until they've been committed, and likewise, criminals aren't truly criminals until they've committed the crime. Psycho-Pass specifically follows the perspective of people living in such a world before this realization, and questions it using the kinds of characters that only Urobuchi could write. In the end, spoiler[those characters fail/succeed NOT because they're wrong/right, but because it's too late for common judgment to save them or because they're simply lucky. The system isn't just criticized--it's determined to be necessary because it's the only way to keep stability in the world. From here, it's just a matter of how the heck one even goes about changing and taking down such a system. If my hunch is right, the only way to proceed in a "positive" direction from here is to go through with what the original series stopped just short of: destroy the system in its time of weakness. And knowing Urobuchi, such a feat will be very difficult to pull of, will require several sacrifices in its process, and be catastrophic when it is pulled off, making us question whether or not it really was a good idea to follow through with in the end (at least, until the world hits its recovery stage). That seems to be the key to most of his stories, at least.] |
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hojo 360
 Posts: 429 |
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[quote=]but the result here is a mostly wooden dub where characters feel more like they're reacting in a void than reacting to one another. It's by no means bad, and improves slightly as it goes, but Funimation has usually done better than this: the lifeless, rushed feeling never really goes away.[/quote] Wooden dub? yea funny as it never sounded wooden and at least to me was spot on and must have been for you as well to get an A-
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phia_one
Posts: 1657 Location: Pennsylvania |
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Out of curiosity, did you read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep or watch Blade Runner first? |
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dtm42
Posts: 14084 Location: currently stalking my waifu |
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Psycho-Pass does get interesting in the second half when it eschews normal Hollywood BS conventions and goes in its own highly-unusual but brilliant direction. It's not just another genre mash.
I take it you haven't seen the first episode? Because some of the things that are explained to Akane are so basic that you'd think even the general public would be familiar with them. It's like she didn't even attend the academy at all. She had to have her own sidearm explained to her, not to mention everything else. |
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Knoepfchen
 Posts: 698 |
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I also thought the exposition/introduction done this way was atrocious. In fact, it was so bad that I started thinking about it again after my second watch. Sure, this is not a very subtle show. But I have my problems accepting it's creators were unable to provide us with a slightly better introduction to this world and it's mechanics. I started thinking if maybe they deliberately chose this kind of introduction because it actually fits their world. We never learn about Akane's training or how it was like at police academy, but it is made clear throughout the show that the people in this worldspoiler[ are living their lives in a continuous state of ignorant bliss. Don't think too much about complicated stuff, because you might open doors in your mind better left unopened.] People have little concept of violence anymore, and even the police are spoiler[nothing more than bystanders, unable and forbidden to actually investigate or solve a crime because it would taint their own mental state.] As there are no crimes to be solved by the police anymore (at least not by the watchdogs/inspectors themselves), how would we imagine Akane's training to have been like? How do you prepare a "cop" for their job without spoiler[exposing them to violent thought patterns or any kind of actual challenging thinking]? I imagine there was some (harmless) physical training involved, and after that a lot of exercise and education about spoiler[how to keep your mind clean and innocent]. Yes, it does seem unbelievable to us that she was not introduced to her weapon while in training and would only learn about how the dominator works on her first day in the field. But is this really that much of a stretch for this kind of world where spoiler[nobody knows or cares how the system they follow works and makes it's decisions, where cops are reduced to helpless bystanders not allowed to care if they don't want to join the ranks of the unprivileged enforcers?] After finishing the show, it does seem a little bit more plausible Akane might actually require this kind of real life info dump on her first day of duty. Or at least that's what I'm telling myself because I don't want to believe they just went for this kind of introduction out of laziness. |
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Ranho
Posts: 68 |
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This show bored me when I began watching it: the spooky boogie arc, the killer artist arc, none of it was really too interesting to sit through.
Then it decided to insult me when spoiler[Akane's friend is murdered right in front of her and her Psycho Pass does not rise. Here is someone who was shaking like a leaf as she aimed a shotgun at another person before witnessing her friend get her throat cut and suddenly "Oh, some people's psycho pass stay level and you are one of those people". Bitch freaking purlease!]. This show is the perfect example of why I detest Mr Urobuchi's work: I'm not one to shy away from violence but violence for violence sake, or rather in the case of most of his shows, violent acts happening to characters you never actually connect with (see opening episode where that man decided to go loco and you know the rest), 2-d personalities meeting violent ends and so on, just comes across as violence for the sake of shock value/violence lust to me (see godawful Fate Zero, a show even worse than this one...IMO). There was nothing in the first season to get me excited for the second one. Didn't like boring clueless Psycho Pass Universe proxy Tsunemori, hated typical silent strong type Kagami (Mr Urobuchi likes Macho type characters it seems), wasn't too fond of the disgraced father and grumpy megane donning son duo, the lesbian duo weren't particularly interesting (besides having trysts during office hours), the happy-go-lucky dude who got Sybilled later on was just another Rider/Madoka genki best friend to keep things from being too serious, Makashima merely had white hair as a cue for fans to know that he was intelligent and the rest of the villains weren't particularly interesting people. And he ABSOLUTELY sucks at writing backstories for his characters. Case in point lesbian girl (though in terms of the most convulted and ridiculous back stories in all of anime see the "main character' from Fate Zero's one... good god...). BTW why give us lesbian girl's back story when father and son duo's would've been better? Odd that. The general idea of the show was pretty amazing, actually, it has to be said. Makes me wonder what'll have happened if someone who actually knows how to write people beyond surface level details (white hair = smart, tall and quiet = brooding) wrote the show.[/spoiler] |
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