English Dub Review: PSYCHO-PASS: Providence

Overview

PSYCHO–PASS was an original anime project for television that began in 2012. Now, after ten years, comes the newest film that will act as the connective tissue between the movie PSYCHO–PASS Sinners of the System Case 3: On the Other Side of Love and Hate and season 3 of the PSYCHO–PASS TV series. The entire story will now finally be told.

The franchise revolves around The Sibyl System, an authoritarian system that quantifies the human personality. Sibyl’s analysis dictates every aspect of the citizens’ future. In exchange for Sibyl’s rule, the citizens enjoy a peaceful life.

With all manner of mental states and trends being recorded and monitored, the standard by which an individual’s soul is measured is a number that people have come to call the PSYCHO–PASS. Detectives, wielding guns called Dominators that measure criminal potential, work closely with enforcers who hunt down latent criminals before they can break the law.

The young inspector Akane Tsunemori, a part of the Criminal Investigation Department, and her partner, enforcer Shinya Kogami, wrestle with the question of how a fair and perfect society can be upheld and maintained by a system that could possibly be corrupt.

In this new film we’re set in January 2118. Chief Inspector of the Criminal Investigation Department, Akane Tsunemori, receives a report of an incident on a foreign vessel – the body of Professor Milicia Stronskaya has been discovered. Behind the incident is a group known as the Peacebreakers, a foreign paramilitary organization and a new outside threat who are targeting the professor’s research papers known as the “Stronskaya Document”.

Reunited with Shinya Kogami, a former fugitive from the Criminal Investigation Department, Akane grapples with a case that quickly escalates beyond their expectations. The Stronskaya Papers could reveal a truth that would shake Japan’s government, and even the Sibyl System, to the core.

It is in this untold story that the missing link is revealed.

Our Take

Featuring the return of writers Makoto Fukami and Tow Ubukata, the Psycho-Pass anime series reaches its 10th anniversary with Naoyoshi Shiotani returning to direct at Production I.G, and TOHO distributing for PSYCHO-PASS: Providence. 

For fans of hardcore sci-fi like Minority Report or Blade Runner, PSYCHO-PASS is possibly the most ardent example of an anime that can deliver the goods in spades. The franchise constantly straddles the lines between “who should we root for?” as we get to kill criminals that haven’t committed a crime yet, just that we know that they are going to.

There’s a LOT of dialogue here across the two-hour long feature-length film that focuses on life in Japan where we’re clearly being led into a television series, so if you already love this franchise, consider this film homework. But, even if you aren’t a fan of PSYCHO-PASS, but you’re someone who has the entire collection of Isaac Asimov at their disposal, PSYCHO-PASS: Providence will go far for you. The action choreography is excellent and provides for exhilarating sequences that will leave you satisfied.

Obviously, the franchise is laying on a bedrock of sci-fi franchises of which it borrows liberally, but in this day-of-age of MCU recycling the same old shit, it’s actually kind of fun to see almost a yearbook of your favorite sci-fi movie memories.