Computer animation has come a long way in the last decade or so.  Once only good for backgrounds and certain types of objects, CGI has now been used to animate entire movies such as Shrek and Final Fantasy.  With the speed of computers going up and the cost coming down, computers are being used more and more for animation.  Sometimes the results are spectacular, as with the movies that Pixar creates, and sometimes they are inferior to traditional cel animation, as with Galerians: Rion.

This movie is based on a video game, and as such has a simple plot.  Rion, a teenage boy, wakes up in a hospital with a girl's voice talking in his head.  She helps him break out of his containment vessel, and he finds out that he has fantastic powers, but no memory.  While running through the hospital he finds himself in, he finds a computer that gives him his name and his family's address.

Breaking out of the hospital, he arrives at his house (how he finds it or gets there is skipped over.)  Wandering through the abandoned building, parts of his memory slowly start to return.  After finding a ring of his mother's, Rion learns what amounts to the plot of the movie.  His father helped create a self-regenerating computer that could think for itself.  This supercomputer, Dorothy, ran the city, but soon turned evil and took over. (Don't you hate when that happens?)   Dorothy dislikes humans, since they don't always do what she wants them to, and she wants to exterminate them.  So she created the Galerians, humanoid creatures that serve her unquestionably.  For some unknown reason she decided to give the Galerians superpowers to boot.

Rion learns that his sister (who he is telepathically linked with) has a computer virus implanted in her head that can destroy Dorothy, and Rion has the key to unlock the virus implanted in his brain.  Afraid of this virus, Dorothy had captured Rion. Instead of just killing him, thereby ensuring her master over humanity for all eternity, she experiments on him and gives him great fighting skills and superpowers.  (Okay, no one every said that the computer was smart, just self aware.)  Now Rion has to find his sister and activate the virus to save mankind from this evil supercomputer.  But standing in his way are several Galerians that Dorothy has sent to kill Rion.

I really wasn't able to get into this movie at all.  The plot was almost nonexistent, just a brief story to pin all of the fight scenes to.  The mystery of what is going on and who Rion is was resolved about a ¼ of the way through, and no more development of any kind was made.  The story was also very derivative of many other SF movies.  The Matrix and Akira come to mind.  But not only was the plot lifted from other movies, the character designs were as well.  One villain that Rion causes to be engulfed in flames rises from them and shows that he had a robot endoskeleton underneath his skin, ala Terminator.  Some of the parallels were so strong as to be laughable.
 
Another strike against it is that the movie had the feel of a videogame.  Rion is faced with a series of places that he has to get to.  He fights some cannon fodder soldiers when he arrives, after which he faces a 'boss' character.  After this fight he finds the next place that he has to go.  There are very little transitions between the tasks.  After one boss is defeated, they he just states what his next objective is and by the next scene he's arrived there.  Like in a video game Rion encounters friendly strangers who help him out for no real reason.  At one point he meets a friendly and generous drug dealer who gives him some chemicals that will double his power.  All for free of course.

The animation wasn't very good either.  You can tell that little money was spent on this production.  The movement of the GC characters wasn't natural looking at all, and the characters have that CG feel to them.   The people look too smooth and are without defects.  In one scene people are in a heavy rain, but they don't get wet.  Their hair still flows and lifts when they turn their heads.  The animation was on par with what you'd find in computer game, and not any better.

Audio:

There were a lot of soundtracks on this DVD.  You had your choice between the original Japanese soundtrack in 5.1 or 2.0, an English mix in 2.0, and an alternative English soundtrack with different music and sound effects that was available in 5.1 or 2.0.  One big problem for me was that you can't switch between all these audio tracks during the movie.  If you want to try another mix, you have to exit to the main menu and go to the language sub menu; they start the movie again from the beginning.  I have no idea why they would disable the ability to change audio track in the middle of the movie.  There are subtitles available in English, French, German, and Spanish.

I thought both audio tracks had their problems.  The background music in the original audio track had a heavy industrial feel to it.  It fit the tone of the show, but I thought that it was a little heavy handed and too loud in some parts.  I didn't like the sound effects in the original version at all.  Most of them sounded like there were created on a cheap synthesizer that was decades old.  Laser blasts hitting Rion's force field sounded like electrical discharges and didn't sound appropriate.

The new mix had much more sedate background music in many parts, synthesizer music with one long note slowly changing into another long note.  But then they added heavy metal rock songs during the fight scenes, and when the fight was over, the song would abruptly end.  The lyrics didn't match what was being shown on screen, and I couldn't figure out why they chose the music they did.  The sound effects did sound more appropriate ion this track, but they didn't include effects in a lot of places where they should have had something dubbed in.  There were many explosions that had no sound at all to them.  That was very strange.

Video:

The widescreen nonanamorphic image was not very good at all.  There was a lot of aliasing throughout the movie.  Lines, especially in the background, would shimmer as the camera moves.  Whenever the top of Rion's head was shown, his hair would seem to be crawling around his scalp.  There was a lot of banding too, where colors don't blend from one shade to another evenly. This is usually noticed when large areas have to change color, like the sky at sunset.  But on this DVD even small areas like Rion's hand and face have this defect.  The whole picture was also a little dark, but that could have been the creator's intention.  Over all I was very unimpressed with the lack of quality in the picture.

The Extras:

This is a barebones disc.  The only extra is a trailer.

Final Thoughts:

This videogame based movie was not very good.  The plot, what little there was, consisted of recycled ideas from other movies and was structured like a video game.  Rather than trying to tell a story, it showed an adventure.  This is great if you are playing a game, but not if you are hoping to be entertained.  People who enjoyed the video game might want to rent this, but everyone else should Skip It.