When you are nursing a broken toe and ordered bed rest, Netflix is the way to go. The cherry on top is to pass the time watching a movie that explores humanity’s existential struggle for survival against an out-of-control, dystopian machine world.
I know, I wasn’t really in the mood for:
Say hello to Blame! Yes, that exclamation mark on the title is not a typo. Much like the 2017 movie Mother! this anime and manga series is titled Blame! (The movie may be about humanity’s struggle for survival, but little do you know about my struggle to write this review while fighting against spellchecker with regarding capitalizing after an exclamation mark.)
Like any other dystopian title, Blame! focuses on humanity’s tenacity in the face of oblivion. The movie has plenty to show in the dangers of technology overwhelming society, as the characters essentially live that experience every waking moment of the plot.
Care to guess what motivates them to keep fighting the good fight? It is the most powerful weapon of all:
Just kidding. When it is survival of the fittest, in a desolate world, family doesn’t have the usual definition. Instead, in Blame! it has more to do with community and connection. One could argue that this is even imposed by the very reality our characters face, driven as they are by a raw instinct for survival, amid gradual annihilation.
So who are they?
Meet the Electro-Fishers.
They are a small and desperate band of humans trying to survive starvation within “The City”, a colossal megastructure that functions as a Dyson sphere (not a new vacuum model), engulfing what was once the Solar System.
A Dyson sphere is a hypothetical megastructure that completely surrounds a star to capture its power output.
Continuously expanding and featuring incomprehensible architecture, the City hosts rooms as vast as planets, and environments where basic physics can shift unpredictably. Its scale is such that it is peppered with fragmented zones of ruined, ancient cities separated by miles of industrial scaffolding.
The Builders guide the City’s persistent encroachment in outer space. They are automated, unthinking machines that continuously, wait for it, build and expand the structure. Protecting and “safeguarding” the City are the deadly Safeguard robots. They are the Terminators of Blame!, except they are far more nimble and creepier.
Tasked with hunting down and eliminating any unregistered human presence, the Safeguard are among the primary obstacles, including the City itself, that the Electro-Fishers must confront in their battle for survival.
You might wonder how it got to this in the first place. Well, that’s the definitive mystery of the movie, and unfortunately, we don’t get a very clear answer, but a walking symbolic exposition of the issue at hand: Killy.
Killy is our “sort-of” hero in this story. He is a mysterious cyborg who traverses the massive City in search of a human who possesses the Net Terminal Gene to restore order and stop the City’s expansion.
With Killy, there is no “Come with me if you want to live” or “I’ll be back”. Rather, the cyborg is a silent companion of the Electro-Fishers who assists them against various enemies. Killy lets his actions speak for themselves, and for the most part, we as an audience, along with the Electro-Fishers, are left towonder about his true intentions and purpose.
The movie’s ambiguous ending perfectly mirrors the themes of the story, its world, and the characters’ personalities. Killy’s journey to find the Net Terminal Gene reflects humanity’s persistence in the infinitely expanding City. Throughout his quest, Killy’s stoic nature contrasts with the humans’ deep desire for companionship and a place to call home.
The premise of Blame! is a familiar sight for sci-fi fans in general, but the movie and the manga series stand out for the sheer creativity of the world in which the story unfolds. The terrifying and magnificent scale of the City remains an eerie focal point of our characters’ struggles and really puts into perspective the seemingly impossible stakes at hand.
At the end of the day, who doesn’t like watching humans fight the good fight against a desolate world that is practically out to kill them? That is Blame! in a nutshell.
The movie explores transhumanism, runaway AI, genetic markers as access controls, and cybernetic warfare. All this across an artificial, solar-system-sized City. After finishing the movie, I only had more questions, and while that is not really what a moviegoer would want, I think it is a great bait for those curious cats out there who might want to take a sneak peek at the manga.
There is a lot more to Blame! in the manga series, and you can find it on Amazon Kindle or at your nearest library’s digital collection. On the other hand, the movie still stands as a decent, but quite condensed, adaptation of the work as a whole.
The Pensive Reverie 