Natural City
Such wasted potential.
An obvious rip off of Blade Runner, Natural City manages to waste a good budget, and eventually an interesting story with muddled story telling. It did not take long to realize that this movie was going to be a mess. The film-making, direction and editing, were a mess. It seemed that so much effort was spend on being stylish that the basics of storytelling was lost. Which is a bit of a shame, because once the movie was over, I realized that the story was actually fairly interesting. Although clearly derived from Blade Runner, there was enough new material that would have made this interesting. Unfortunately, the characters were never developed enough to really justify their actions.
As a simple example, one of the major story lines involves a police officer breaking the law in an attempt to save the life of a robotic woman that he has fallen in love with. Yet it was explained why he was so in love with her, nor was he particularly affectionate with her at anytime during the film.
There was a time when a interesting looking Asian film was probably good, otherwise it would not have made it to North America. Those days are, unfortunately, over.