It's 2019. 30 years after WW3, Neo-Tokyo is gripped with strife.
Amidst the chaos, a young man named Tetsuo has been kidnapped by the state. His friend Kaneda is determined to find him before it is too late...
In time for its 4K release, Akira is back on the big screen.
I have always enjoyed Akira but seeing it on the big screen really draws attention to how much detail has been put into the world-building.
The violence is extreme but the way it is deployed is interesting - sometimes it is comic; sometimes it is tragic; sometimes it feels completely senseless.
I will not pretend to know the full context behind it but the underlying fear of the apocalypse; political collapse; generational divides - these are themes are pretty universal, and still resonate.
There are some unintended predictions to Neo Tokyo which added an edge to the satire - the film is set in 2019 and the climax takes place at the construction site for the 2020 Olympics. As with real life, that event will have to be postponed.
The movie has a great sense of humour, from the Verhoeven-esque portrayal of the ultra-violent police, and Kaneda's role as hapless bystander as follows Kei into the bowels of the city.
Kaneda is a complicated character. He is a brash, violent, sexist and not that smart. He is also a loyal friend, and seems to genuinely care for people - particularly as the world seems to be collapsing. Narratively, however, he has little real impact on the movie, other than providing a regular joe's perspective to the machinations of the rebels who trying to bring down the system. He comes across as a sidekick ala Jack Burton in Big Trouble in Little China.
On to the action set pieces - they are still breath-taking and remain disturbingly visceral - there are so many moments where the film emphasises the frailty of the human body, such as the moment in the first motorcycle chase when a rider falls off his bike, goes under the tires of another bike and his arm flops around like a rag doll. Or the scene when Kei kills a man and the camera lingers on the man's body as he gasps for breath before cutting to her horrified reaction.
In this film, death is terrifying, and even as the city falls apart, it is the visceral moments that prevent it from coming across as empty spectacle.
Not everything works - while I enjoy the he scope of it, the story darts from plot thread to plot thread.
The portrayal of Kaori is terrible - I do not understand why she is in the movie. She exists purely to show how terrible the world is. She lacks agency and exists purely for torture and killing. It is a disturbing black hole in the movie. Kei has more agency, but by the third act she exists almost entirely as an avatar for the children to fight Tetsuo.
The three kids are still very flat - the vocal performances of the Japanese and English dubs are sadly very similar in that regard.
Even with those issues, the movie still works - I am always drawn to the sense of a world simultaneously expanding and collapsing, growing and dying, evolving and regressing - it’s a full meal of a movie.
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