https://anilist.co/anime/8100/MardockScrambleTheFirstCompression/ I randomly got the urge to watch Hellsing Abridged not to be confused with Hellsing Ultimate and during that scene in Seras backstory I got reminded of this movies beginning. So in the most generic cyberpunkish dystopian advanced civilization we follow this particular big shot with an underaged girl wrapped in his arms on a perfectly dark night in a perfectly isolated automobile in a perfectly isolated woodland doing what the night asks except its far from romantic. After a few minutes of doing his thing the guy gets out of the car locks the girl in and then... BAM The car explodes after a very graphic depiction of a young helpless girl frantically fighting to rescue her broken life. This is insignificant. What counts is that an unaffiliated third party comes to her aid despite the fact that he had been closely studying everything prior to the explosion with his heat vision goggles. They only save her psychologically by implanting her with an artificial fiber body which completely messes up her mental state and nearly kills her due to some law that allows the police to resuscitate the criminal witness. Now this befuddled cyborg must defend her innocence as the mistake known as Her Past haunts her on both a societal and psychological level. Fortunately she is being supervised by a professor com scientist com gambler and an AI resembling a rat but how much can they handle this psychologically unstable cyborg while evading a hunter appointed by the villain? TLDR What if Batou was actually a villain and Kusanagi was actually a confused teenage girl in an edgy Ghost in the Shell ripoff? One clear thing while watching the movie is the oversaturated colors. The entire movie is bright and shiny everywhere and every time which is both a plus and a drawback. Plus in the sense its bright and drawback in the sense that its so bright that it makes me avert my eyes. There are however some slick gun animations with some good camera usage and choreography. This is something that appears throughout the trilogy so if anything it gets entertaining eventually. But it doesnt. Because the story is just edgy and pretentious This goes down the lane as you progress into the trilogy. Not even in the entertainingly edgy but in the most boring sense. Like the court where our mentally complicated victim can only answer in a Yes/No/No Comment throughout the trial or the whole irrelevant gambling plot that happens in movie 2 or whatever the fuck happens in movie 3. The story progressively degrades from being a mildly mindbending character study into edgy bullshit drama. As a trilogy it really fails because you dont feel like you watched a coherent story unraveling character pasts or decisions but 3 separate films with 3 different plot lines got superficially intertwined. You are better off spending those 3 hours on Ghost in the Shell 1 and 2 even as a rewatch it would be a better experience than this trilogy. While 2 3 movies are not worth the time the first compression however is definitely worth experiencing because of this mildly interesting character study between Balot and Oeufcoque. Balotto is a confused cyborg who already has a damaged mind and past as a human being. Oeufcoque while being an AI shows genuine human emotion upon hearing this emotionless girl asking for its love a cute tiny ratlooking AIs love and the movie does a surprisingly good job by not making this weird but making their interactions emotional. But thats all the credit I give for the movie in the writing department. Anything and everything else is just a poorly written edge fest with very little damn giving to portraying themes or invoking drama. Conclusion The only good thing about this movie is the AIrat Oeufcoque. If it wasnt for Oeufcoque this trilogy wouldve been a pretty waste of time.