This was the first anime adaptation I've seen following reading the manga. That being said, as a standalone movie, this is pretty bare bones basic besides the world being quite good with its scaling. The characters feel extremely tiny and at the mercy of their world. The characters themselves however, are bare-bones-basic. They aren't likeable, but they aren't unlikeable. They're on par with an empty shell, with zero depth and here to serve the plot more than be their own people. The characters who are from the manga feel more like wasted potential, besides Kyrii who stays relatively the same in this adaptation. This is also the first (fully) 3D movie I've seen and I have to say the work was eh. Characters feel laggy at times, (there was a frame drop near the start of the movie. This was the movie, not my streaming platform) and they couldn't bother to make more than like 4 background character models so the duplicate villagers are extremely apparent and off-putting. However, that's where most of my complaints end that are objective enough points to judge. The score itself was amazing, Yugo Kanno composed for this movie and personally this is my first slice of his work. I'm very impressed and now have around half the soundtrack in my personal collection to listen to. The movie's premise was also nothing special, because we take the perspective of more the humans rather than Kyrii, the amount of potential we can take from the world is extremely limited and uninteresting compared to Kyrii's quest.
Now, I'll be delving into this as an adaptation rather than the standalone movie. This movie is incredibly underwhelming after reading the source material, I did not read the one volume manga, Blame!: The Electrofishers Escape, which this is based on, but even as a standalone movie this doesn't offer the watcher much else besides an interesting world and a dull story. Tsutomu Nihei's art style is incredibly gorgeous to look at and unfortunately that cannot transfer well into a 3D movie. It would be astronomically difficult though to do 2D with his style, so I understand that the struggle to make the movie was incredibly easier via 3D.
However, in the manga, the storytelling presented is almost entirely by visual storytelling. There is little dialogue present in all of BLAME!'s books, and that did not translate over to film. We will never get a true Tsutomu Nihei story that's told and shown the way it was meant to be, because unfortunately a movie told mostly through visual storytelling doesn't sit well with most people, much like 2001's A Space Odyssey. But unlike that movie, Nihei's work is incredibly interesting and unique, making it a spectacle to take in a single panel of his work. Moving on to the characters, I have no idea if they were accurate to the manga one off, but they made Sanakan a one dimensional Safeguard due to the runtime of this movie and Cibo was also changed in her introduction. The story this movie chooses to tell, its incredibly underwhelming and disappointing how much potential was missed due to the choice of having the humans be the main characters and Kyrii a supporting character. We only see a very very short step of Kyrii's goal and its not satisfying to finish watching the movie knowing this.
Overall, it was a fine watch. I was bored at few points, the voice acting was great, the score was incredible, they got the world down for what little we see, and a lot of wasted potential. I wouldn't recommend people to watch it, pick up the manga instead.
