Quick, is there a Japanese word out there that means the same thing as chutzpah? If not, may I suggest they adopt the word vexille in its place? As in, "It takes a lot of vexille to make a soulless CG-animated movie that's about the replacement of human beings with soulless automatons"?
 The title character of Vexille is a female soldier, a member of an elite special forces unit operating in the United States during the last half of the twenty-first century. Her team's latest mission, though, takes them to Japan, which ten years before had gone neo-isolationist after the United Nations started to outlaw the advanced robotics technology that the country had come to specialize in. As the story opens, the leading Japanese manufacturer, Daiwa, appears to be nipple-deep in skullduggery, and the American government wants to find out what exactly is going on inside Japan, especially after some creepily life-like androids begin showing up state-side.
The movie actually does a pretty good job of generating suspense and tension, though not all of it is of the good kind. On the positive side, it does a nice job of keeping you guessing as to what is going on inside Japan itself and to its people. The entire archipelago is blanketed under a high-tech screen that blocks unwanted traffic and surveillance, so no one on the outside has any idea how far the Japanese bio-robotic engineering has proceeded or what social effects it has had. It would be a fairly major spoiler to reveal exactly has happened to Tokyo; suffice it to say that there is more than one revelation to be had about it and its citizens, with each revelation layered under another revelation, and that these revelations are mostly surprising but not illogical. The mystery surrounding Daiwa and why it is doing what it is doing is rather less satisfactory, but evil corporations and scientists who are only one breath away from the stereotypical tirade ("They called me mad! Mad, I tell you! But I showed them! I showed them all!") are staples of the genre. Least satisfactory are the "time trial" sequences, where tension is cheaply generated by ticking clocks and races to beat slowly closing doors. No prizes will be awarded for guessing how many good guys make it through said doors, or which good guys make the cut.
The action scenes aren't bad of their kind, either, though they rely very heavily on elements—explosions, fast vehicles, and heavily-armored infantry jogging along at a brisk clip—that we've all seen lots of times before. The best action elements involve the "jags," which are giant semi-mechanical creatures that are a little bit like sandworms and a little bit like tornados. There are some thrilling low-angle traveling shots that put these monsters in the same frame with some dune buggies, and these give you a nice sense of how terrifying it would be to go up against such a thing. Unfortunately, these sequences completely lack the wit—the intelligence and the sly humor—with which Twister photographed and characterized its superficially similar cyclones, so in the end they aren't must more than elaborate special effects.
 That lack of a characterizing spark, more than anything else, is what hobbles and hollows out Vexille. The title character is too sadly emblematic of its faults at storytelling. When a movie takes its title from its central character, you would expect that central character to have some dramatic heft. But Vexille herself is pretty much just a cipher. It is implied that she harbors strong feelings for one of her teammates, but they get only a few truncated scenes together. She gives a couple of turgid speeches about how she's going to take part in a raid, dammit, and she weeps over the death of a supporting player. But at no point is she called upon to make interesting choices or reveal any kind of characterizing growth or change. In fact, she is little more than an audience surrogate dropped into its sci-fi setting to act as our tour guide. So she gets to listen to a lot of exposition on our behalf, but she says and shows little to nothing about herself. The mysterious "Maria," whose delayed appearance is built up with a lot of foreboding, would actually make more sense as a title character, since she in many ways acts the part of magical MacGuffin to the plot. She also has sharper corners than Vexille, which makes her a lot more memorable.
Even at the plot level the movie disappoints. Daiwa, it becomes clear, is fighting a guerilla battle in its own backyard, and it knows exactly who the ringleaders are; and yet it never makes the slightest move toward decapitating the resistance. Its own larger plot, as I've said, doesn't make much sense except as a magnificently malignant bit of madness; and yet the awfulness Daiwa has unleashed is not obviously latent in its products. Rather, it feels as like a scriptwriterly conceit in order to justify making the company into a bad guy.
And, at the end, that's what Vexille feels like: a cynical exercise in penny-dreadful antics dressed up with a lot of pseudo-philosophical hugger-mugger about "the human spirit." I don't mind penny-dreadful adventures—I rather enjoy them, in fact—and I can forgive a lot of cynicism. But I prefer it when it's honestly presented. Vexille vexes because everything in it, down to its one meant-to-be-harrowing death scene, feels like it's been calculated to the twentieth decimal place on the same the computers that animated it.
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