Patlabor WXIII

While investigating the destruction of Patrol Labor robots in Tokyo's harbor, police detectives Kusumi and Hata find themselves drawn into a complex world of biotech research and military intrigue that ultimately leads to a showdown with a gigantic mutated monster who looks kind of like the love child of the "Creature From the Black Lagoon" and H.R. Giger's "Alien." Technically, this is the third feature film in the popular Japanese anime Patlabor series, but given its barely futuristic contemporary meditation on the dangers of genetic tampering, WXIII works, more or less, as a standalone film that focuses on the thorny ethics of creating life in a lab. And while the movie generates little interest in its cop protagonists (one of them predictably young and idealistic, the other predictably older and battle-scarred), the two encounters with the beast WXIII--first in a darkened factory, and later in an empty stadium, to the strains of Beethoven's Piano Sonata in G Minor (Pathétique)--elevate the disappointingly flat animation in this monster fable with a moral twist. Presented in both the original Japanese with subtitles and an English-dubbed version, this is recommended. Aud: P. (D. Fienberg)