Psycho-Pass First Impressions--Minority Report: The Anime

I don't want to get into a huge discussion comparing the movie to this show, but that was the overall feeling I got from this episode.

 
I can't deny that this was a cool opening episode and that I enjoyed it, but I wonder how much of this was the show setting its tone or if it's trying to be gritty for the sake of being gritty. While it's really cool (and unexpected) for an anime to visually remind the viewer of Blade Runner, that creates a whole host of expectations of the bat. Is this going to emulate those movies in a sort of homage, or try to do it's own thing? And there are a lot of cliches right off the bat; dystopian city in the rain, brand-new police officer on her first case, a system designed to make the viewer question the morals of society... If you're a sci-fi fan, you've been here before.

 
That's not to say that it's handled badly; Psycho-Pass seems to be catering itself to people who like the genre. But it's a difficult line to balance, and I think it'll take a few more episodes for Psycho-Pass to decide whether it wants to do Big Brother With a Twist or venture off the beaten path a bit more. The rape scene is a good example of how I'm not really sure if it's trying to make a statement or if just being dark... The scene did serve a purpose in establishing how the system doesn't care about circumstances, but I'm not sure it needed to get that violent to get the point across. The same criticism goes for the guns that make people explode like popcorn. It's a pretty cool visual, but is it necessary?

 
All that said, I'm intrigued by Psycho-Pass if a little skeptical about it staying away from standard cliches. From what I've seen of Urobuchi, he likes to subvert viewers expectations with violence, but that's par for the course when your setting is a gritty dystopia. I'm prepared to eat my words though, since what little we saw of the characters was really interesting, especially the Enforcer squad. I'm also interested in seeing more about how this psychological profiling system works, if therapy is so bad that recommending it causes a guy to snap so badly. There are a lot of interesting ideas here that I'm excited to see play out.

Images from Funimation.com.