Note: spoilers follow...
I'm glad I knew nothing about this movie prior to seeing it. A coworker asked me whether I wanted to go and that was that. It made that first shot of a future New York cityscape so powerful. Of course, by the same token, it made for a lot of confusion and guessing; I don't know whether reading Bilal's La Foire aux immortels would've mitigated that, but I doubt it.
Bilal experimented with a few art forms in the movie, most often to great effect. For instance, the humanoid hammerhead bounty hunter - a synthetic dayek, I believe it was called - was all the more menacing because its metal teeth scraped as it moved and breathed. Put that character beside the computer-generated imagery and it really stands out.
And that brings me to the form that didn't always work: some of the CGI characters. The gods looked pretty good, but any of the more animated - in the excited sense of the word - humans looked stiff. As my coworker said, it was like watching a video game trailer at times.
That aside though, it was a fantastic film, in the best sense of the word. Really beautiful and alive. Bilal's wonderful imagination more than made up for the disjointed story and sometimes inadequate animation.
