A Couple Mini-Reviews

Ergo Proxy looked like an atmospheric noir cyberpunk anime series. I suppose it sort of is. The best word for it that comes to mind, though, is phantasmagoric (ie. dreamlike - thank you, old word-a-day calendar). Visually, it's dark. Dark enough that there were a measurable percentage of scenes difficult to make out - not a particularly good thing. Characters are... okay, with some good and bad traits. The story is... scattered. Whole episodes of the 23-episode series are spent in internal reflection, dream states, or the out-of-nowhere quiz show. It's disjointed for no particular benefit. I suppose the creators were going for deeply psychological, but I can't help but feel the actual plot could have been presented more tightly and been a more thrilling and captivating 13 episodes, if that. Even then, the series feels like more style over substance.

Snowpiercer was on TV over the weekend, and I hadn't seen it, but mentions have popped up a lot on sites I frequent since it was released. So, I watched. It was... okay? It's class-focused dystopian "closed system" story. Setting it on a globe-spanning train seems a little ludicrous to me, but that form of "realism" isn't really the point. That aside, I suppose it works fine, but doesn't really startle or impress me.
Honestly, I might have been more impressed with it if I hadn't read Wool, which pulled off a somewhat similar story better. Even the Fallout games have sort of inured me to a lot of the basic sci-fi ideas involved.

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