Blue Gender
The Movie:
The Warrior
(MVM Region 2 PAL DVD)
(2004)
review by Blackgloves

Paul Verhoeven's "Starship Troopers" and the "Alien" franchise provide the main influences for this full length anime feature composed of the twenty-six part SF TV series "Blue Gender". Whittling nine hours-worth of TV material down to a one-hundred minute movie and having it remain comprehensible, as well as well paced and exciting, seems like a bit of a tall order but, for half of its running time at least, "Blue Gender: The Warrior" succeeds quite admirably before running out of steam in the final half-hour. The experienced US audio team from FUNimation provide the feature with a worthy English 5.1 dub that maintains the feel of the original Japanese track quite well -- holding on to the series' original punchy music score and adding the familiar tones of their team of talented voice actors to the mix in a script that seems to maintain the sense of the original Japanese version. The Japanese dub is included on MVM's disc, as well as two sets of English subtitles: one transcribes the rewritten English script word-for-word while the second is a closer translation of the Japanese script.

In 2031 Yuji Kaido wakes from suspended animation and discovers he has been asleep for twenty-two years after contracting a bizarre viral infection called The Prophecy Syndrome which leads to strange visions and, eventually, madness. Kaido was put into a cryogenic chamber, along with many other sufferers, until a cure could be found. Unfortunately, during that time, the world has been destroyed and modern civilisation ended by a race of giant insect-like monsters called The Blue! The most valued and powerful members of humanity -- scientists, intellectuals and politicians -- left the planet and set up a space station called Second Earth. The remaining survivors are treated as second class citizens and are left behind in the ruins of the great cities to be hunted by The Blue!

Upon waking, Kaido is confronted by an armoured robot-like soldier. Confused and terrified he tries to escape -- only to find that all of the other cryogenic chambers have been destroyed and their occupants eaten by the giant bugs! The armoured soldier manages to fight off the giant insects and rescue Kaido from the underground facility where his chamber has been stored. He discovers that, underneath all that armour, his rescuer is actually a beautiful female soldier called Marlene Angel; she is leading a team who have come from Second Earth with orders to rescue the "sleepers" because they have important genetic material from a generation before the Earth was destroyed by The Blue, which may be important in defeating the invading monsters. Since Kaido is the only survivor, the future of humanity lies in his hands! After the team is wiped out in a succession of violent surprise attacks by The Blue, Marlene and Kaido try to make their way across a ravaged landscape to the launch pad which holds the shuttle which will ferry them to Second Earth.

The most immediately noticeable factor in this series is the higher than usual level of violence and gore it contains. Limbs get severed and bodies are crushed and torn and mangled in the most graphic of ways, while the designs for the insect monsters, The Blue seem calculated to appear as vulgar and nasty as possible: although there are many different insect designs encountered by the two heroes as they make their way across the Earth, they all have faces and mouths which, to not put to fine a point on it, appear to be modelled on female genitalia and which ooze slime! The first fifty minutes or so manage to disguise the fact that the movie is a composite of material from a TV series with Marlene and Kaido travelling from country to country and everywhere discovering devastation and destruction. The film maintains a bleak tone throughout with sympathetic characters getting killed-off left right and centre, usually in rather unpleasant ways. It all hangs together rather well though until the protagonists actually get into space when the story becomes strangely confused. The finale, like that of so many anime series, comes across as rushed and fails to answer many questions raised during the film's running time. Nevertheless, there is enough horror and action content contained herein to provide a fair amount of entertainment.