Blade Runner: Black Lotus

Ah, Kenji Kamiyama. Your work since GitS:SAC season 1 has yet to fail to disappoint me. Blade Runner: Black Lotus is the latest Kamiyama-directed title I have reviewed here on MyAnimeList, following Eden of the East, GitS:SAC 2nd GIG, and GitS:SAC – SSS in exactly that order. At the end of my Solid State Society review, I said I would make the smarter decision and avoid GitS:SAC_2045 based purely on my past experience with the directors’ work. The Blade Runner films being personal favorites of mine apparently superseded my better judgment, however, when it came to Kamiyama’s second outing as the frontrunner for a CGI animeseries, so here we are. The pleasure I gleaned from this show only became guilty in the last pair of episodes. For most of the first ten or so, I was pretty genuinely having a good time, but that enjoyment was so obviously in spite of the show’s few attempts at being a serious and thought-provoking cyberpunk story in the same vain as its predecessors, attempts that virtually entirely fall flat. I say this because there is a massive emphasis on action sequences and nailing the audio-visual aesthetic which completely overwhelms any and all but the most barely-dramatic moments that create only the most barebones emotional connection between the characters and audience. Credit where it’s due: Black Lotus pulls no punches in being a series that looks and sounds amazing with design elements and environmental details that are absolutely to my taste, but it’s not a stretch to say I felt basically nothing for these characters. It isn’t even necessarily because they are poorly defined; they just don’t do anything really dramatic. The final pair of episodes are just all action all the time until the narrative weight drained away and I just wanted it to end already. And, make no mistake, I was only referencing the core cast when I said the characters are not that poorly defined. Side characters show up and vanish as quickly as snow on a warm day usually without even half an episode of on-screen presence for the show to utilize their somewhat unique positions to provide new perspective on the setting. So, if the side characters are mostly relegated to the background, there is nothing done to explore the setting further, the (few) main characters have very, VERY little in the way of meaningful dialogue, and the audience has basically no emotional attachment to anybody at all for the vast majority of the show’s run, then what are we left with? A completely by-the-numbers revenge story with a heroine that is basically invulnerable and targets that are both unabashedly reprehensible and as destructible and threatening as paper airplanes. This is all set to a backdrop involving only the most rudimentary science-fiction elements taken from the Blade Runner films with basically nothing new introduced. Once most of the very barebones drama is ironed out by the end of episode four, the story all but limps from one action scene to the next until the end of the show. Episode ten is the oddball here, being both a brief reprieve from the violence and one of the strongest outings in the series because it actually has some measure of emotion, a pulse of sorts. Unfortunately, it still culminates in a finale that does little to actually end the narrative with any satisfactory arcs for the characters and, having seen Blade Runner 2049, does even less to serve as a prequel (to a film that already had four if you count all the canon shorts). In the end, the best that can be said here is that Blade Runner: Black Lotus looks and sounds great. Just like its predecessors, it leans more heavily into film noir than science fiction, something of a welcome contrast to the very technobabble-heavy atmosphere-lacking Ghost in the Shell franchise. But, for as much praise as I can and will continue to shower upon the production quality, Black Lotus leaves much to be desired when compared to other shows let alone its own forerunners which have cemented themselves as classics that captured the essences of their respective eras and translated them into the most beautifully-realized dystopian worlds. Perhaps no other work had done so since another Philip K. Dick masterpiece, The Man in the High Castle. It’s a tall order for a series, or any work, really, to match that level of cultural importance or even to be as well-made. I have no doubt that Kamiyama and co. were incredibly anxious and stressed when trying to come up with a story to tell on top of getting all the aesthetic details right. I think, at the end of the day, the overall effort is highly commendable; there was clearly an immense amount of love, passion, and hard work put into making Blade Runner: Black Lotus feel as close to the originals as it could feel, and many people, Kamiyama included, deserve a standing ovation for realizing such an ambitious goal so impressively. However, the fact is that this series is not well-written. Its characters and story are almost entirely uninteresting and the only engaging aspects of the setting are lifted from the works for which it is clearly banking on the audience having immense appreciation and nostalgia. It deeply and truly saddens me that, in spite of having that appreciation, I cannot recommend this show. If you want hardcore film noir and science fiction but also aren’t afraid to encounter the surreal and weird, then I would instead recommend checking out Serial Experiments Lain. Maybe I’ll review that next. Happy watching! - LC