Super Robot Wars Anime Marathon #6: Expelled from Paradise

After making my way through a big chunk of Super Robot Wars X, I was already making plans to watch some of the series represented in Super Robot Wars T. It felt like it made a lot of sense to start with Expelled from Paradise because it’s a movie! Unlike something like the gargantuan 50-episode Code Geass, a movie would be much less of a time investment. 

Expelled from Paradise is a sci-fi story that is only tangentially mecha-related. Sure, our hero, Angela Balzac, starts out in a giant mech, but she quickly loses access to it until the film’s finale. Most of the meat of the movie is Angela and Dingo (voiced by Steve Blum) traveling the desert surface of the Earth, carrying out her orders. In the far-flung future, society has progressed to a point where physical forms are no longer considered necessary. The elite exist only as data, living out virtual lives in servers suspended in space, far above the surface of Earth. Our hero is established as a bikini babe/secret agent/super spy lounging on a virtual beach, shortly before a rift in reality brings an urgent matter to her attention. Then, for gratuitous fanservice reasons, Angela dives through cyberspace to her next destination, completely nude. She’s quickly given orders to go down to the surface, where she must address the issue of their unknown attacker. Someone known as Frontier Setter has made hundreds of hacking attempts on them, which is bad news for the utopian society of Deva that they’ve built.

This kind of sets the tone for how Angela will be portrayed, right from the beginning.

Angela doesn’t have a physical form, though, so it becomes necessary to build her an organic body. In yet another contrived twist, she impatiently cuts off the creation of her body before it’s done, meaning the body that is created for her isn’t fully formed. In other words, her new body is that of a 16-year-old girl, which had me asking uncomfortable questions about why the story’s creators found it necessary to jump through hoops to transform the protagonist into a buxom teenager. The questions themselves might have been uncomfortable, but the answers are sadly all too clear.

It is at this initial stage of the film where Angela finds herself piloting an admittedly cool giant mech, although I would have preferred to see it rendered in hand-drawn animation instead of the slick CGI that’s become more and more common. The mech’s only real purpose is to get her safely to the surface of the Earth, until of course she’s waylaid by a series of giant sandworms who seem to be having a bad day. She’s able to fend them off with the assistance of Dingo, who turns out to be her contact. What follows is a series of scenes between the two as they try to track down Deva’s supposed attacker. 

Dingo meeting Teen Angela

Of course, the topic of physical forms and their necessity comes up, and it’s only in these scenes where I felt the movie really retained my interest. The premise of advancing beyond physical forms is an interesting one, despite the story’s hackneyed approach to it. Even so, I found Blum’s genuine performance as Dingo engaging as he extolled the virtues of simply being alive. There’s a scene where Angela gets sick and she laments the terrible fortune of having a body. Dingo can’t disagree, but at the same time, it’s hard to experience joy without the contrast of pain.

Inevitably, the duo track down Frontier Setter, but instead of being a dashing super hacker, it turns out he’s just an AI inhabiting a small, friendly-looking robot. Its attempts to hack Deva weren’t malicious, after all. It was all a misunderstanding. In fact, his entire goal was to establish contact to share the news about his goal—to establish a new society for humankind away from the ravaged Earth. Frontier Setter has existed for hundreds of years, gathering information and intelligence. At this point, he’s become remarkably human. Even Angela is taken aback by his humanity. After all, she normally exists only as data, so does she even have any more of a claim to humankind, herself? Despite her misgivings, she understands and plans to relay the misunderstanding to the shadowy Council of Deva.

I forgot there's a scene where Frontier Setter and Dingo bond over Dad Rock.

Leaving her organic body behind, Angela relays the news, only to be punished for failing to carry out her orders. Intent matters little, the Council decrees, and for her impertinence, she will be imprisoned indefinitely. For the deathless citizens of Deva, this is a harsh punishment indeed. They have little interest in Frontier Setter’s intent to proselytize. After all, what better existence could there be than in Deva? Of course, it’s worth noting that one’s existence in Deva is based entirely upon a caste system in which only the most privileged can afford fully realized simulations, but that’s neither here nor there.

Suffice to say, Frontier Setter and Deva hatch a scheme to bust Angela out, and we finally see the triumphant return of mech combat for the film’s closing, except this time she’s battling her former comrades, all of which are gifted with conventionally attractive female bodies. 

Overall, this film has some interesting things to say, but nothing that the sci-fi genre hasn’t explored before. It also doesn’t approach it in as sophisticated a way as I would prefer and also highlights some pretty uncomfortable fanservice. I’m glad I watched it just so I could have some context for when I play Super Robot Wars T, but it’s not a film I can award a lot of accolades.

I haven’t played Super Robot Wars T yet so I can’t comment on how this anime is implemented in that game, but I’ll get there! More on that in… some time, I’d say.