Akira (1988)
This post is part of my ongoing project to watch my science fiction blindspots. You can find my list of upcoming movies for this project here.
I’d heard so much about how influential Akira is; what I wasn’t expecting was to see how seamlessly Akira folds its own influences into its story without ripping off the originals or cheapening itself in the process. The movie does its own heavy lifting.
And there’s a lot of heavy lifting involved. It might look like a dystopian action movie, but it’s more concerned with how its world got to that point, with protests and procedure, by accident and by design. Akira sees its dystopia as a long slope, with some parts of society floating high above the morass, others deep in the sewers, and everyone feeling differently about where they landed and how they got there and what they’re going to do about it. And its real strengths are in the action: long smooth shots of machinery flying through the air or skimming across the ground, reveling in speed and power without losing sight of the consequences for those who lose control. If a motorcycle is in reckless motion, it will crash, and it will break, and so will the body astride it. It’s the same with history in the world’s alternate future. Once the atom bomb becomes a possibility, it must become a reality, and the reality is that bombs exist to explode. Neo Tokyo lives in the literal and figurative fallout from one such bomb, and unknowingly it exists under threat of another, once the scientists involved can figure out how to make it. Making the weapon is only half the battle. The rest is learning that a bullet, once fired, can never be returned to the chamber.
Akira manages to walk a fine line between grotesque and beautiful, both with the action taking place on screen and with the heady concepts the movie plays with. Nearly every frame features a flaming bloody red, the color of life, of flesh, of a shining motorcycle, of death and destruction. The biker gangs who race the streets recall the vehicle-to-vehicle action of the first Mad Max, down to the consequences of crashing at speed. As with the original Mad Max, the end of the world in Akira hasn’t come yet, but it’s in sight, and it’s barreling down the highway, and the only people aware of their impending fate are the authorities. Some of those authority figures are scientists playing with human bodies like they are toys—a theme shared by Alien and Aliens. The chirping whirr of the Nostromo’s computer from Alien makes an appearance in the background noise of the labs of Akira. They click and beep as the head scientist scans the body of a boy who will eventually lose his shape and his sense of personhood in the pursuit of scientific advancement, threatening the well-being of everyone else around him. And when that boy finally understand who he is and what he’s capable of, the epiphany is as shattering as the stargate in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Like Dave Bowman before him, the boy travels through the speeding cosmos toward an open, blinking eye.
