Akira (1988)
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Akira Movie Review
Akira is a 1988 animated science fiction action film directed by Katsuhiro Otomo. It is a landmark cyberpunk movie that I still do not find to be great.
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“The future is not a straight line. It is filled with many crossroads.
There must be a future that we can choose for ourselves“
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Biker Kaneda is confronted by many anti-social elements while trying to help his friend Tetsuo who is involved in a secret government project. Tetsuo’s supernatural persona adds the final twist. I watched Akira a decade ago and I disliked it quite a bit. Rewatching it now, I like it much more, but I still do not love it and I still find it to be rather overrated.
The themes here are quite diverse as they range from government corruption to the dangers of nuclear power to the ideas of destruction and rebirth. The effects of technology and Neo-Tokyo itself clearly make this movie a cyberpunk story. However, those sci-fi elements were still not as fully explored as I wished them to be.
In actuality, Akira is more of an action film than a true SF feature. It is an action flick with some evident disaster elements with the final half an hour being all devoted to utter destruction. Those scenes were undeniably very memorable, iconic even. The monstrous form that the protagonist takes with the pink ooze in particular was unforgettable. However, the violence and grotesqueness on display was still too over-the-top and the film’s kinetic action was also aggressive to the point that it rendered the viewing experience rather exhausting.
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One of the main issues of Akira is its lack of memorable characters. Kaneda and Tetsuo are okay, but even they aren’t at all fleshed out. The female characters fare even worse as they are totally brushed aside and underdeveloped. The American dub is horrendous, but the original Japanese voice acting is very strong. I just wish that the film made us care about its characters more and that way maybe we would have had a moving story like ‘Cyberpunk: Edgerunners’. But when you don’t care about the characters, the entire story is affected by that disengagement.
Visually, Akira is truly tremendous. I cannot praise this film enough for its animation as it truly is one of the best-looking anime movies of the 20th century. The backgrounds are meticulously detailed, the overall color palette is very pleasing to the eye and the movie aged like fine wine thanks to its polished look and some impressive designs of machines and cityscapes. Some of the imagery was truly mesmerizing and just iconic here.
Akira’s action is also frequently astonishing with that first act being particularly terrific. The entire motorbike sequence was so perfectly executed and so exhilarating that it has stood the test of time and become highly influential on other anime works and action films in general. Still though, the action scenes are so overwhelming and aggressive that the film became off-putting in certain sections with all that audio-visual excess. The score also did not appeal to me personally, though I can certainly admire it for its uniqueness. It’s a very long movie at two hours and I was frankly quite bored with it, so it is ultimately one of those films that I respect more than I enjoy.
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I can certainly admire Akira for everything that it did right, including its staggeringly amazing animation, some impressive action set pieces and a couple of interesting themes. It’s a landmark cyberpunk anime for a reason. However, I still respect this film more than I really enjoy it as its overwhelming action and all that audio-visual excess was rather exhausting at times. It also failed to properly develop its characters, which led to me not caring what happens to them. It’s thus a somewhat overrated movie that has its standout elements, but too many detractors for me to fully enjoy it.
My Rating – 3.5
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