Psycho-Pass (Review)
Are You a Criminal if You Don’t Commit a Crime?
What if you knew someone was going to commit a crime before it happened? Sound like Minority Report? Well it’s not: I’m talking about Psycho-Pass. True, it sounds like something we’ve all heard of before, but Psycho-Pass takes the concept a step further and focuses on revealing whether someone is even capable of committing a crime based on their psychic crime-coefficient , which is constantly monitored to ensure that society remains safe. Those people whose coefficients become too clouded are taken in by special police before they can commit a crime; those that do commit a crime are executed. However, the inspectors have a secret weapon when it comes to fighting the psychos out there: psychos of their own, called “Enforcers,” who aid in the hunt for their own kind.
Psycho-Pass raises a lot of questions about morality and the potential for evil within us all, and I love when series do that. It’s not as heavy-handed as Ghost in the Shell, but at certain points it does feel like writer Gen Urobuchi is trying to prove how well-read he is by throwing around quotes by famed authors and philosophers. That’s fine, but it’s a little far fetched at times. Still, the series is thought-provoking, especially when it comes to the police arresting people who haven’t done anything but who are just stressed enough for crime to be a possibility. After all, how can a machine that reads a person’s personality and actions truly ever comprehend the gray that lies between black and white? And I have to admit that Psycho-Pass does a pretty damn good job at thinking things through. While it never answers that question for itself, it really gives viewers the tools to come up with their own opinions.
Psycho-Pass creates a beautiful blend of traditional animation and CGI, especially when it comes to the guns that the Enforcers and Investigators carry. The guns, called Dominators, can only fire on people with high crime-coefficients (that way, innocent people never get shot), and they transform when going from non-lethal to lethal. It’s one of best blends I’ve seen of these two kinds of animation. While it’s not perfect, this series makes incredible use of the technique.
One of the biggest turn-offs in the entire series is the protagonist, Akane Tsunemori, who is just so damn bland and boring. I found it difficult to care about her or her character growth as she went from a rookie to a star Inspector. I was much more interested in the mysterious Kogami, Akane’s Enforcer. In fact, the Enforcers generally seemed a lot more interesting and charismatic than the Inspectors, and it was easier to become attached to them. Maybe that’s just because I like crazy characters, but the Enforcers’ growth is very impressive, and the series really takes into account how all the characters react and change based on their circumstances.
Directors Katsuyuki Motohiro and Naoyoshi Shiotani manage to create a compelling dystopian world for the characters to inhabit. Once more, they create some truly brutal moments; the show is about catching actual psychopaths, after all. There are even a few crazies that really turned my stomach, which made the urgency of the series all the more invigorating. While some of the crimes are truly disgusting, they only add to the theme of the series. Psycho-Pass never dwells on the images but focuses more on the actions behind them. That doesn’t take away from how gruesome the scenes are, though.
Psycho-Pass is quite a compelling series, and it offers a lot of well-known science fiction and cyber punk themes. While it doesn’t necessarily handle them all as well as some of the films and series that came before it, it definitely uses them to give some food for thought. The series devotes a lot of its relatively short run focusing on how the world the characters inhabit affects them, which is a great reflection of society. That being said, it’s a series that doesn’t really believe in subtlety and is very up-front with everything it needs to say. However, the world of Psycho-Pass is open-ended enough for viewers to decide how they feel and how they think the series ends.
