Akira
1988
🎯 Verdict
✍️ Full Review
“Complete Surrender”, says the new God. It’s like Harlan Ellison wrote his surrealistic version of Project Sentry that was too imaginative in scale to be adapted by Hollywood. I am sure stories about how this story materialized, must have been written as legends somewhere; this one was so far ahead of its time. Viewers who gave lukewarm responses to Luc Besson’s Lucy did so maybe because they were comparing that with something unscalable which got released 26 years earlier. Now, it feels like I am up to speed and kinda see their point. What amazed me the most was how this late 80s anime tackled the concept of- Whether one deifies and kneels before this pure energy or revolts against it to keep the matter surrounding us humans intact, the energy itself which it drives from this fundamental forces of cosmic horror doesn’t care. Facing the sheer nature of boundless energy eye to eye, how borders, ideologies and social hierarchies melt before it because everything we hold dear to including emotions, values, love, loss, despair, trauma and others, everything and quite literally anything is just fodder for it. The best way to explain Akira is- It’s like conducting a bhajan ceremony or putting your house in order at the precipice of existence while a massive black hole is engulfing everything around you on the horizon. At the current juncture of stunting and wasting of the superhero genre that’s been going on lately, this is the superhero movie I have been searching for which came from the late 80s in the form of anime.