R and Noma are out to retire a group of outmoded cyborg warriors looking for a way to extend their waning life-cycles. Noma thinks that R's relationship with Ria is effecting his job but little does he know that Ria is a cyborg and R is using their missions to harvest and sell AI chips to scientist Dr. Giro in order to find another body to house Ria's memories and the perfect match seems to be fortune teller Cyon (whose own father requested he be buried with the AI chip of his own cyborg lover) but another rogue cyborg Cyper is also after her to extend his own existence. The problem with NATURAL CITY is not that it's plot is derivative of BLADE RUNNER (the director is very forthcoming about that) but that the relationship between its central couple is so flat. When we meet them, their doomed relationship is well underway and they seem more fashionably alienated than anguished. Ria is a blank slate without any human qualities (it could be argued that this is an effect of her winding down but we are shown nothing of what attracted R to her in the first place) and R isn't particularly likable (he is more interested in harvesting the AI chip of a cyborg that has massacred several of his fellow soldiers than the one other survivor barely clinging to life) nor as interesting as Noma (though only Cyon really stands out due to her more lively character). None of the cyborg deaths possess any of the resonance of their BLADE RUNNER counterparts either. The film's stylistic debt to BLADE RUNNER is more successful than its narrative debt. The neon-lit, rain-drenched exteriors and some interiors do not recall Jordan Cronenweth's work on the Ridley Scott film so much as replicate it, they actually have the look and feel of an eighties futuristic movie while some other views of the post-apocalyptic landscape bring to mind other memorable futuristic films of the eighties and nineties such as Richard Stanley's HARDWARE. On the other hand, the MATRIX-styled action scenes are less impressive and monotonously-staged. Although the film's aesthetic is derivative of earlier films, it looks refreshingly unique among its contemporary ilk (despite the use of the end credits to show off scans of production design sketches).