The silver lining in the mushroom cloud

Rating: 8/10 (12 April 2010)

There's a vast allegory here - a post-Hiroshima distrust of the wheels of industry - that runs through a lot of modern manga, from Doomed Megalopolis, through Patlabor 1 & 2, to Katsuhiro Otomo's own Steamboy. (More recently, with films like Ghost In the Shell 1 & 2, the dominant fear has been of a kind of hidden cyber-apocalypse.) But the urban apocalypse was most powerfully and poetically realised with Akira. Otomo's movie, based on his own manga comic, clocks in at over two hours; it is a dramatically arresting epic. It's also visually sumptuous. Remember this was 1988, before the CG revolution - the huge images contain herein would have been impossible to recreate 'live'.
Some might resent the characters' lack of personality. Indeed, they're far less outwardly expressive than the more caricatured efforts found in, say, Wings of Honneamise or Metropolis. But Akira is not concerned with sentimentalising its characterisation. Key players are wantonly dispatched amongst Tokyo's toppling tower blocks - Tetsuo's (Nozomu Sasaki) girlfriend, the ghost-white Kaori (Yuriko Fuchizaki), for all her stubbornness and pleading, is a vessel of tragedy. The closest we get to an intimate relationship is between Tetsuo and Kaneda (Mitsuo Iwata), although ultimately even this comes down to some nuclear-fuelled fisticuffs. This is not to say that Akira's characterisation is lacking - far from it. In fact, the psychological plight of Colonel Shikishima (Taro Ishida) as he realises the folly of his lust for power, and then his subsequent forgiveness, is moving; likewise, the horrible ordeals of the ever-young 'Espers' gives their final sacrifice added poignancy.
There are murmurs of a live action remake of Akira (at one point with Stephen "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" Norrington attached). Quite apart from the intrinsic pointlessness (unless your point is profit) behind remaking perfectly good films, what will become of the original's real trump card: namely its sheer unhindered scope? Here is a movie which not only dares to look the apocalypse in the eye, but even shows us what lies beyond. What will it sound like, for instance, as Kaneda's bike rolls across the empty road bridge towards the ruins of neo-Toyko, when Shia LaBeouf utters those simple yet profound words, "I am Tetsuo"?