directed by Takashi Miike, Takeshi Watanabe, Hiroyuki Tsuji, Manabu Asō, Kazuya Konaka et al
Japan
4.5 stars out of 5
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As a tokusatsu fan, I should probably know better than to judge by appearances at this point, but I have to be honest: I did not expect the television show about a walking, talking cell phone who solves cyber crimes with a 16-year-old boy as its partner to be one of the best things I've watched in recent memory.
The show basically gives you everything you need to know about it within its opening credits. Keita, a high school student, suddenly finds the whole course of his life changed when he witnesses a man killed by a rogue construction crane in front of him, and discovers that the man was secretly an agent for Under Anchor, an organization developing special AI-powered cell phones to combat cyber crimes. Keita is reluctant at the beginning of the show but becomes a full-fledged Anchor agent soon enough, and by the end, god damn, that high schooler is the best agent they ever had. (Okay, maybe not the best, but probably the most emotionally invested.)
This show has pacing issues. I will say that up front because I think that what constitutes "issues" for any other show is instead, for CPI7, something it wears with pride. One of the things this show does that I really admire, and that I wish more series would do, is bring in different directors and let them keep their directorial style. Every so often there will be an episode that's so wildly different that you think "wow, who did that one?" and you look it up and surprise! It's Mamoru Oshii (for example), and you can tell it's Mamoru Oshii, because instead of keeping to a baseline throughout the entire series, some episodes are allowed to just be these wonderful little one-off capsules of weird that don't develop the plot but feel instead like a movie starring the characters of the show you've been watching.
For a show ostensibly about cyber crimes, there's really not a lot of cyber crime-solving going on. Most of what happens is very self-contained and usually the stakes aren't that high: Keita and some random guy almost get killed by gun smugglers, a little girl finds Seven (the phone) and he helps her get over feeling alienated by her parents' impending divorce, a really bad comedian makes it his mission in life to court Touko, and, like, literally just The Ring, to name a few. Like I said, the double episode that Oshii directed is one of the most astonishing things I've seen in the context of a television series, and it has absolutely nothing to do with solving crime. It just lets us meditate with the characters for a while in a world that is wholly a fantasy and is more real for it.
"Life is just saying goodbye."
"Then what is the spring that always returns?"
I think by far the crowning achievement of CPI7 is how much it got me to care about the phones. When we begin the series' storyline, Anchor had been developing cell phones called Phone Bravers with the ability to walk and talk and learn from their partners, seven of which were created but only three remain functional (we learn about the others as the show progresses). The phones are partnered with human agents who are referred to as their "Buddy", and develop a bond with them where each influences the other, as the phones provide tactical and logistical support that a human couldn't, and the human provides, for lack of a better term, life skills for the Phone Bravers. And let me tell you, they are doing some kind of magic with how well the Bravers are integrated into the cast. By the end of the show I was 1000% invested in the phones and 1000% forgetting they were little CGI phones and not actual human cast members. It's just absolutely perfect at making you care about the Bravers and feel for them as they respond to - and develop - emotions in their own flawed, weird, nonlinear, very human way.
To discuss the story in-universe a little bit: the bond between the Bravers and their buddies is integral to the overarching plot of the show. The ultimate villain is a rogue AI named Gene created by Ultraman Agul a shady tech CEO that evolves to come to the conclusion that humans are making the world a worse place and should be eliminated. Gene becomes a villain precisely because it's let loose without the ability to learn from an individual human the way the Phone Bravers are. Gene's creator failed to provide the kind of care, attention, and empathy that the Under Anchor agents did for their phones, and instead he just mass-produced them as quickly as possible with a childlike brain intended for rapid growth and self-sufficiency rather than emotional reasoning and understanding. The Phone Braver program works because the phones are treated like people, because they functionally are. The relationship between the Bravers and their buddies is a friendship between equals. Gene is a feral child left to fend for itself, with nobody else to learn from but other feral children.
I want to nominate Masataka Kubota, who plays Keita, for every award retroactively. The way he handles the massive tonal shifts from episode to episode is admirable. He does at times feel authentically like a 16-year-old boy, but he doesn't play Keita like a parody of himself. And he always sells his interactions with Seven and the other Bravers. The whole cast does, but Keita has more direct interaction with the phones than anyone else. I was so fully invested in the final episode due to how Kubota was nailing it and how the writing team was managing to make these phones feel like real living characters that it was honestly a little overwhelming.
So, yeah. I watched the cell phone detective show and it got me really emotional. I wish there were more shows like this, but this one is a special, rare thing, and maybe that's how it should be.
