<harmony/> : Interesting. On the whole positive, but there are enough nits that I'm not gonna call it an all-time great or anything. It does a heck of a lot of stuff right, though, stuff that I'd like to see more often, so. For starters: Having a protagonist who is in their late 20s and has a job. Amazing, I know. Yes, there are flashbacks to high school, of course. For another: having a kind of cyberpunky world that is, for the most part, pretty well off! The world of harmony/ is the vaguely Star Treky-on-Earth one of life extension technologies, biomonitors, and ubiquitous monitoring and surveillance. But mostly in fact for your own good; they want to ensure everyone is properly socialized and such and there's no repeat of some WW3-esque nuclear incident in the past. (With hilariously small numbers. Only 10 million people dead? 10 million people could go missing tomorrow in America and it'd be a blip.) And, something I respect, they remember that not everybody will be on board with this, so there's the people who live in the closed arcology-esque cities with life-extension and their own media and the like, and Everybody Else who doesn't.
Anyway, Our Heroine is a WHO inspector. And terrible person. How do you make a society at peace where everyone lives forever interesting? Have a sulking ball of spite be the main character, intentionally living on the fringes and openly talking about how much she despises her homeland of Japan with all of its niceness and courtesy. Much like Orphan Black, while perhaps you wouldn't want to be friends with such a person, they make for a good perspective character, as they go on their rampage through the plot. Anyway, shit goes pear-shaped, and she has to investigate, and it seems tied to her high school friend / lover / cult leader who is somehow even more of a terrible person. Except that she's long dead, so...?
Anyway, a bit of the Fight Club issue in that you need to appreciate Tyler Durden's charisma and acknowledge he has some valid points while still realizing that he's totally a villain who has to be stopped. The two extreme ideologies in <harmony/> - one of "smash the state" and another of Firefly-movie-esque mass pacification - both get a bit *too* much credit by the writers IMHO for how compelling they are. Alas. As a result, the movie runs off the rails in the last 10 minutes, but oh well. I still liked it.
More spoilery nitpicks:
* As someone who appreciates talking problems out rather than meaningless fight scenes, they'd honestly have been better off with just a straight action sequence at the end. They might have been lovers *once*, but that was a long time ago, and Micah's gone totally crazy and murderered people including her friends in pursuit of the ultimate high or something. The main character should be perfectly willing to shoot her with less blubberyness, except perhaps as a trap.
* I wish they'd amped up Micah's turn a little better, with her raving about how her brief time "unconscious" was like super-cocaine, and once you've experienced it, you'll stop at nothing to go back. The idea that she was involuntarily drugged into experiencing that makes her still sympathetic enough as a villain. That said, you'd think that someone who discovered consciousness "by hand" would be the very person harmony wouldn't work on...? Like, she clearly isn't using the same path everyone else is.
* The harmony system was presumably only enabled on people in the actual Lifeism system, right? So... is this gonna work? They show the whole map lighting up though, which implies that it's the entire world. If it's not the entire world, it's kinda unilateral disarmament, since your society of peaceful robots & philosophical zombies is gonna get wrecked by one crazy barbarian invading.
