Ambitious, but Too Much Packed into One Movie

Rating: 6/10 (16 July 2019)

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Akira, like other famous anime films, can prove to be quite bizarre at times. Trying to explain the premise of the movie is challenging since the story takes a while to focus on a main plot rather than three or four different subplots.
The movie starts with what appears to be a bombing of Tokyo in 1988, then quickly jumps to the year 2019 (hey that's this year!) and the city of "Neo Tokyo." A bike gang with key members Kaneda and Tetsuo becomes the focus of the film as we simultaneously see a civil war happening in the city due to lousy tax reforms which upset the citizens. On top of all that, there exist three children with psychic abilities who are being monitored and cared for by a group of military members and scientists who are concerned that a mysterious being Akira will be unleashed in the near future. The last important thing to note is that Tetsuo gains psychic abilities after interacting with one of these psychic children at the beginning of the movie. It only gets stranger after all of that.
As can be seen from the last paragraph, Akira is a movie that could be helped if it did not pack so much into one story. The plot is so convoluted that it is honestly difficult at times to tell who the true protagonist of the movie is. From the cover art on the box of the blu-ray disc as well as the first fifteen minutes of Akira, the protagonist seems to be Kaneda, and one would think the movie would primarily about him as a leader of a bike gang, but as noted above, the focus of this movie is all over the place.
The writer/director's choice to set this story in the middle of a civil war is interesting yet strange to dissect. As we get further into the story, we are led to believe that the explosion or bombing at the beginning of the story might have been a result of the titular mysterious being, Akira. Once Tetsuo receives his new abilities, the group of military and scientists begin to talk about Akira as a sort of common enemy that will unleash hell on Neo Tokyo due to catastrophic events in the past. This notion is reminiscent of people in power uniting against a common enemy in the graphic novel Watchmen, and the visuals surrounding the common enemy are strikingly similar as well. With all this in mind, this part of the story is almost to no avail since the common people in this movie are always seen fighting with the government. This common enemy never seems to fully unite them, but rather causes a ceasefire between the two parties.
That last thing to discuss about this film is its rating of R. It receives that rating due to graphic violence and brief nudity, both of which do appear in the film, but this film can easily be catered towards younger audiences if the nudity was dropped from the film. In the scene that involves nudity, it is heavily implied that members of a rival bike gang are going to attempt to rape a woman, but they only undo her top in the scene before they are stopped. If they are stopped even earlier than this, then this film could probably receive a PG-13 rating since the violence in the film is more cartoonish than disturbing.
Akira is definitely not a film for everyone. Ultimately it tries to pack too much into its 2-hour runtime but it is ambitious in nature, so it at least deserves some respect.
6/10