Oct 3, 2022
One of the first things you'll notice about Edgerunners is its use of colour. The series' palette is vivid, extremely vibrant, going far beyond cyberpunk's typical neon-drenched aesthetic and contrasting wildly with much bleaker futuristic visions of '80s and '90s anime. It harmonizes with the show's - and the genre's in general - overarching theme of sensory overload and the mind's inability to keep up with technology, realizing it far better than anything else in the series.
Unfortunately, this brilliant colour palette is too often wasted on chaotic, messy depictions of exaggerated action sequences. And while sometimes the chaos does add something to the narrative or
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emotional weight of depicted events, most of the time it's just showy and self-indulgent. Which is a shame, because with a more restrained, focused approach the gore and body horror stemming from futuristic violence would certainly hit much, much harder.
On top of that, Edgerunners tends to be even messier in its narrative than it is in its style and action. In the first half of the series, the writers seem to lose sight of the characters as actual people rather than just plot devices for extended periods of time. When they try to compensate for that with quieter, more introspective scenes, they usually end up resorting to clichéd dialogue that fails to provide true character development.
The second half of Edgerunners takes its psychological themes more seriously, but with the series' short length and the lack of proper foundation from earlier episodes, its interesting ideas are underdeveloped, resembling a rough sketch rather than a finished painting. Episode 9's desperate attempts to imitate Akira don't exactly help, either.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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