Armitage III: Dual-Matrix

Armitage III Dual Matrix is not a bad movie sequel but it's not a masterpiece either.

The OVAs had a solid premise and mystique to them, this one has new animation which improves certain aspects of the movie. It's a bit of a mixed bag in Naomi's design, they improved her outfit, with tighter dress fitting but the facial expressions of the OVA felt more polished to me maybe it's my cel shaded bias, don't take it as if the details are not there this one has plenty of Naomi details, for the rest of the world building aspects unfortunately it suffers from the not so ... great 3D animations wish they went for the 2D animation only, for the Ross and the mecha animation sequences are very crisp.

Story takes a back seat due to the antagonist being one dimensional fare and the exploration of Earth is not shown that much, if we recall the OVAs we get a deep dive into Mars ecosystem. That however you wont be noticing much. Since they added some political drama into it which makes it worthwhile on understanding the universe. Also somehow they abandoned that idea of Earth being somewhat liberal centric from the OVAs, perhaps the focus of the story is minute. And somethings do not get proper outcome.

One small aspect I would point out is the OST is not a strong aspect of this movie.

The standout part is how Naomi's character arc gets some fleshed out story, that's the top class achievement by the staff here. They took her OVA character and improved on her without taking anything away, she gets to keep her hot style, caring. Ultimately making her into a woman. This makes up the whole story. Plus the best part is Armitage is a Cyberpunk show and it sticks to it's guns and elevates. For the fans of OVA they will not be disappointed even it falls a bit short of it since this is a niche genre and we got this to enjoy the best of Naomi.

Like the review I just did on it's predecessor, it's biased but time has had an effect. After the first Armitage, Naomi and Ross are together. With their daughter. Yeah, Ross knocked up a robot, figure that one out.

This time there was another attempt at producing more like Naomi, on Earth.
They are killed and the last one emails her dying memories to Naomi...on Mars... Okay, we got some WTFery here, not gonna lie.

Naomi abandons her family to go kick some ass, some old guy sends Ross and their daughter to a big Earth conference in his place, ... kid is snatched, mom is pissed, the big bad has a couple imperfect copies of Naomi try and kill her, and that's about it.

Wasn't the best written even back then, but like the first they had a really good OST, the animation is improved by a decade and is very bright and colorful, looking more like early 2000s titles.

The best? Meh. The worst? Nah. Worth it? I say most def. One of the rare better sequels.

Armitage III Dual Matrix

Dual Matrix feels very much like one step forward and two steps back compared to the original OVA. While on the technical side it's a large improvement I don't think there's any more fun to be had here than with the OVA.

Art/animation: I'd say this is where most of the drastic improvements took place with visual style of the anime becoming a lot more consistent. From the way the world looks to characters themselves it feels much more solid and defined. On its own it is not that amazing either since it's just a bog standard sci-fi affair with tightly packed skyscrapers ... and lots of metal and electronics everywhere. However it's still a decent looker, less jank than in the predecessor and better shot composition on average as well as cool color schemes here in there that are more in line with what you'd expect from cyberpunk. The gore aspect is gone by the way so you expected exploding hands and oceans of blood like in the OVA then you'll have to kill that murderboner for now.

Story: Things somehow have gotten worse and I'm not talking about the events of the movie. The writing in the original show wasn't much to look at either and I can't exactly call that one self-aware but at least they didn't shove it in your face that much. Not the case with Dual Matrix. It feels as if someone on the team thought they've really got something going there and they put a lot more focus on making sure you understand how complex this whole conflict is. In reality it hardly is. I put so much effort to get invested into the story and soak up everything they feed out to the viewer but it's hardly worth it. To begin with we're working with wooden characters that feel less than one dimensional, like hell, I can't even see what Armitage is supposed to be, at times she's a cute mom robot that goes out at night to protect her kind from injustice and takes it all with a great sense of duty and responsibility, other times you see her casually play with people that try to kill her and smirks at the danger ahead. It's a combination of this ally of justice and battle hungry battle robot that's doesn't make sense and is never elaborated upon. When you have a such clash of personality you can't just leave it out like it doesn't matter cause it doesn't fit. To me it just seems like at certain moments the action sensibilities take over and instead of crafting a proper story with characters you can care for they thought "what would happen in a badass action movie" and tried to replicate it without much success. Another moment that made me think this was when Armitage jumps through a window, scans what's ahead of her and we see a whole bunch of armed robots. The way it's presented you'd expect a cool, fast paced action scene to flow from here but instead she just shoots two robots out of a billion and runs through gunfire to elevator and just leaves, ok, cool, that's some badass action you got there. But at least we get to see Armitage fight the same two clones over and over for like half an hour, that couldn't have been shortened in favor of some variety. So yeah, characters suck. Especially the main villain cause it's just a guy who was in the first part for like 4 minutes and doesn't get any development at all. It's just a mess, it would take twice the runtime of the movie to go over each individual element and explain why it's so bad.

Music: Minor improvement over the original. Even though it's a infinitely more cheesy it's also a lot more fitting to the occasion this time around. That's about it, despite it all it's not memorable in any way and just crosses the line of serviceable.

Directing: Not much of an improvement in this category either. I'll commend that they finally started kinda caring about color direction in a sci-fi title, flow of action is a lot more coherent and shots on average are composed better but it's still a mess when it comes to pacing and how much time needs to be spent on something important vs shots of characters looking at things.

Fun factor: Unless you're some hardcore Armitage fan just pass it by. It's a meh action flick and it's an even more underwhelming sci-fi movie. Your time would be better spent watching one of the countless sci-fi titles that executes everything better.