released 25 jan 05 / last mod 01 jun 07 / greg goebel / public domain
* At the beginning of the anime series TEXHNOLYZE (22 episodes on six DVDs), we meet Ichise, a bare-knuckle boxer in the underground city of Lukuss. Lukuss is by no means what one might expect from an underground city: it is no shiny "technopolis", resembling more a run-down industrial town from Latin America or the like, with gray daylight that switches to night in a moment on a regular schedule. Lukuss is run by a collection of gangs and justice there is a bit on the rough side: Ichise steps on the toes of a fight promoter and has one of his arms and one of his legs cut off with a sword.
However, Lukuss has access to advanced "Texhnolyze" technology, which can provide prosthetic limbs that are more than mere limbs, and Ichise finds himself made whole again -- and increasingly immersed in the intrigues of Lukuss, involving a cast of characters including Onishi, the noble "boss of bosses" of the Organo, the biggest gang; Shinji, the informal head of a youth gang, the Racan; Ran the Seer, Ichise's guardian angel; the Doc, the mad scientist as a manipulative and ruthless blond, Ichise's dark angel; and Yoshii, a visitor from the surface world with an agenda.
At the outset, TEXHNOLYZE seems very intriguing, slowly handing out story elements using a style that is dark, gray, moody, complicated, varying between quiet and violence. It comes on a lot like old film noir suspense flics, particularly gangster and crime movies. The mood helps build up the story with slow rising tension to a thunderous, violent climax that left me on the edge of my seat.
Unfortunately, TEXHNOLYZE suffers from the disastrous defect that the climax takes place halfway through the series -- and it then promptly falls completely to pieces. It's almost as if the person guiding the production up to that point quit or died and the whole thing fell into the hands of incompetents. The story degrades at one point into something that looks like THE GODFATHER MEETS INVASION OF THE CYBERMEN, and keeps right on going downhill. I kept watching to the final episode to see if it would finally tie things up, but TEXHNOLYZE ultimately fizzles out completely into violent twaddle so totally incoherent that I wondered what toxic stuff the scriptwriters had been smoking.
I started out thinking that TEXHNOLYZE was going to do something new and different, but by the time it came to its morose and unsatisfying ending (everybody dies, should've killed them all off sooner and saved everyone the bother), I felt downright disgusted with it. I believe TEXHNOLYZE was built by folks who had worked on SERIAL EXPERIMENTS LAIN; TEXHNOLYZE ends up having all the sloppiness and silliness of LAIN without LAIN's moments of mystery, light, and transcendence. Forget this one.
