Appleseed Ex Machina is a continuation of Appleseed, both based on a comic series by Shirow Masamune. I like the previous Appleseed because of the unique cell shading technique used to render the characters. This quality is preserved and looks even better in high definition. There are a lot of good action and sceneries. The mechanical design and buildings is top-notch.

While the quality of the animation and sound effects are good, the last 15 minutes of the film was very disappointing for me. Unlike the previous movie where ESWAT people had to fight huge tanks, here they are just getting ran over by mobs and leaving the few heroes to save the world. Having a bazillion of faceless little weaklings on screen makes uninteresting action, but it is even more anticlimatic when they find the final villian. Sigh.

It is also interesting to see that powerful characters in the film are mostly female. But ultimately the tanks from the previous movie have more personality than some of the walking and talking characters. Japanese subtitles would have been nice. Accurate specification on the labels should have been a given, but I guess they really got lazy. I wish I can get the previous Appleseed in high definition.