I've talked about Psycho-Pass numerous times on my blog before, having come to the series late and then catching up in a semi-haphazard manner. I watched all three TV seasons, which was relatively easy since they're often simulcast and thus quickly picked up by streaming services, but the thing I was missing was the four movies; the original The Movie and the Sinners in the System trilogy.
When Funimation acquired Cruchyroll and the two biggest anime streaming services merged, Funimation's titles gradually started appearing (or reappearing in some cases) on Cruchyroll. Psycho-Pass had been a Funimation license up until the third season, which Amazon picked up during its exclusivity deal with the Noitamina programming block which produces the series. The Movie had streamed on Funimation, but hadn't appeared on other platforms like Hulu where they would sometimes share content, and me being unwilling to shell out a sub just for one movie, I didn't watch it until finally... I noticed the other day that it had popped up on post-acquisition Crunchyroll.
Watching day had come.
If you've read my previous Psycho-Pass posts, you know that one of the things I'm really keen on is how future stories build on the foundations and limitations of the Sibyl System established in the first season. A "good" continuation will provide tension while expanding on how crime can still happen in a world where the probability of a person commiting a crime can be analyzed down to a number, and without resorting to the asymptomatic trick that was used in the first season (where a person for whatever reason simply cannot be read).
Psycho-Pass: The Movie does this pretty well. I wasn't sure at first whether I liked the setting moving outside of Japan, but it does give us our first glimpse of the world outside the country. I don't think it's ever established exactly what happened to the rest of the world, but Japan in the world of Psycho-Pass is a walled off dystopia, where everyone is closely monitored for signs of criminality and latent criminals are removed from the general population to keep it mentally healthy. It's implied the outside world is a mess. Our heroes are part of the police, and in most of the TV series they hunt down criminals who slip through the system.
The movie begins with a team of militant foreigners sneaking into Japan and the police quickly determine they had help from someone very familiar with how Japanese law enforcement works, and former enforcer Kogami has been spotted in the country of their origin, the Southeast Asia Union (SEAUn). Determined to find out whether Kogami has allied himself with terrorists, Akane obtains permission to go to SEAUn as a special envoy to discover the truth. SEAUn is in the process of integrating the Sibyl System in its first use outside of Japan and is willing to host her, but cannot guarantee protection should she enter territory occupied by their insurgents.
Due to being a movie the story can't give much focus on the entirety of the cast, so the bulk of the drama rests on Akane and Kogami. Ginoza gets a couple nice moments to tie up his relationship with Kogami and allow him to escape at the end of the movie (which Akane's sense of justice would never allow), but beyond that there's really nothing other than a few lines for the remaining members of Division 1.
As for how things work around the Sibyl System, it was a new tact that hadn't been done yet, and it sounded plausible, so I appreciated it.
Basically, a dictator is trying to install Sibyl in SEAUn, but by nature, he himself should be a latent criminal if he can think that way, right? So why hasn't Sibyl noticed?
We find out that the SEAUn government has inserted a program that prevents the scanning of individuals flagged as friend in a the local "friend or foe" system, so the dictator's forces are never logged as the latent (or actual) criminals they are when they fire indiscriminately against the insurgents (who are largely regular people that just want a free government of their own choosing).
The "trick" isn't bad, since its a method of circumvention we haven't seen before, but the best trick is that Sibyl was aware of this and allowed it to happen in order to dispose of the dictator's military and allow Sibyl proper to be adopted voluntarily by the populace.
Akane forces a confrontation with the dictator, who as she suspected, has been replaced by one of Sibyl's crimnally asymptomatic brains. The person instead the robot double is amused by Akane's insistence he step down and allow the people of SEAUn to choose their government freely, when the answer is inevitable, but agrees. And as Sibyl expected, the movie ends with people feeling sympathetic towards a politician willing to take responsibility for everything get out of hand, and he is voted back into office with a plurality of votes. As far as Sybil is concerned, nothing has changed from the desired outcome, but Akane has been humored.
But, this is a movie so there's not a lot of time to spin up subplots and a lot of depth. I think it did extremely well for being a movie in an established franchise that doesn't work off of episodic content, and it doesn't waste runtime by padding itself with fanservice so every character gets a nod. If they're not important, they stay in the background, and the result is a tight story that does just what it needs to do.
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